□ Placeholder: 16 — A Letter from The Dolomites

Summer 2020, Dolomites

These are Three Peaks of Lavaredo in South Tyrol of Dolomites. We decided to walk around it — a complete loop. Looking at it from the all possible directions. It was early morning as evidenced by fog up above (burns off fast and then magically appears again without a destined place) that adds coolness to the breeze. Summer on the high plateau can be delectable as honey.

For this particular walk, we didn't aim for the peaks. Aiming for the highest point is not the only way to climb a mountain. We were just not interested in discovering a pinnacle-point from which we could become the “catascopos, the looker-down who sees all with a god-like eye.”

In The Living Mountain Nan Shepherd proposes imagining the massif not as a series of individual summits, but instead as an entity: _The plateau is the true summit of these mountains; they must be seen as a single mountain, and the individual tops... no more than eddies on the plateau surface.”

As walkers, our aim was to practise observance. Same peaks from different perspectives. In the book she continues, “So simply to look on anything, such as a mountain, with the love that penetrates to its essence, is to widen the domain of being in the vastness of non-being. Man has no other reason for his existence.”

In the photograph, the uniformity of the warm, green grass layer of the plateau just beneath the peaks is fragmented by a barren land patch. Probably because of mudslides. If you look closely you can see the the smaller grass patches regenerating in the barren wasteland. An old shepherd hut stands sits unaffected. I wonder if the people living in the hut could see the peaks from their window.

This walk was different because we didn't have a destination. Nowhere to reach. Rather, our origin was the destination. And Nan agrees to this kind of mountain exploration too:

> “Yet often the mountain gives itself most completely when I have no destination, when I reach nowhere in particular, but have gone out merely to be with the mountain as one visits a friend with no intention but to be with him.”

Until next time,
K