My mother is a geographer. She studies culture and human migration patterns. The way that people move over land, traversing its ridges and hugging at its curves. There is a map that hangs above the desk in my mother’s office. It is a topographical map of the American West, and it must be six by five feet. It is painted in rich browns and yellows, the peaks of mountains protruding off the wall and into the space of the room. Sometimes, I like to run my hand over this map, feeling the way that the mountains stretch and pull at the cardboard underneath them. I trace my fingers along their spines, and I let them dip into the cracks, running the course of rivers.
I like the way land moves, the way it rises and falls, its ridges breathing life into dirt. I think of the mountains and the canyons of my grandmother’s home. Red rocks rising from a flat desert. My grandmother grew in a place where it takes purpose to grow. Not much grows in the deserts without meaning to. There are no accidents there. You have to be thankful for a lot more. Scarcity breeds gratitude.
I have stood in front of the map in my mother’s office, yearning to run my hands across the surface of the earth and feel the way that it extends and dips, like little bumps tickling my palms. I’ve spent a lot of time searching for some form of answer from something that is larger than myself, but have failed to listen close enough. It wasn’t until I sought answers in the earth that I got any form of reply.
There must be something, underneath all this dirt and earth, that pushes at the surface so the earth rises. And even all that dirt and soil and rock cannot be tread down by the movements of humans as they walk across its surface. Humans, despite their tools and their thoughts, move around and over mountains. They used to understand the power underneath that soil. The power of some eternal force pushing back from inside the core of the planet, a cosmic energy asserting its place in the universe, asserting the strength of its lands and the flow of the things within it, moving and changing, shaping generations.
The Mountains and Me
The sight of mountains has always contained my life. I grew up in the San Fernando Valley, surrounded on all sides by peaks that I could look to if I ever felt lost. There were nights I would drive up to the overlooks, park my car, and sit on the hood. I would look out over the valley and look up at the night sky. I spent a lot of nights up in the hills praying. I thought that maybe here, up without the mess of trees and houses and streets, that reception might be a little clearer, and that maybe I’d be heard. I always measured my stability with those mountains. Used them to navigate in the dark and would stare out at them from distant points while driving, just because sometimes they were the only thing that wasn’t moving in my life.
I started to look to the mountains when I wanted to pray. When I felt as though I needed answers I couldn’t find in myself. It was safety. Knowing those mountains were there. The earth could absorb my doubt and spit out something like a response. Even if the response that I really wanted was within the silence of land. There was something comforting in a prayer directed at some place. If I couldn’t place god, somewhere within my wants and comforts, at least I could feel the mountains pushing at me from the horizon.