the secret

Excerpt from the book The Snow Leopard by Peter Matthiessen

The secret of the mountains is that the mountains simply exist, as I do myself: the mountains exist simply, which I do not. The mountains have no "meaning", they are meaning; the mountains are. The sun is round. I ring with life, and the mountains ring, and when I can hear it, there is a ringing that we share. I understand all this, not in my mind but in my heart, knowing how meaningless it is to try to capture what cannot be expressed, knowing that mere words will remain when I read it all again, another day. 

~~
and the secret is expressed so beautifully. Perhaps! this is the most moving paragraph for me in the book.

tis a good feeling!

Srik

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What's on your mind?

Excerpt from the book The Snow Leopard by Peter Matthiessen

Why is death so much on my mind when I do not feel I am afraid of it? - the dying, yes, especially in cold (hence the oppression brought by this north wind down off the glaciers, and by the cold choppiness on the cold lake), but not the state itself. And yet I cling - to what? What am I to make of these waves of timidity, this hope of continuity, when at other moments I feel free as the bharal on those heights, ready for wolf and snow and leopard alike? I must be careful, that is true, for I have young children with no mother, and much work to finish; but these aren't honest reasons, past a point. Between clinging and letting go, I feel a terrific struggle. This is a fine chance to let go, to "win my life by losing it", which means not recklessness but acceptance, not passivity but non-attachment. 

If given the chance to turn back, I would not take it. Therefore the decision to go ahead is my own responsibility, to be accepted with a whole heart. Or so I write here, in faint hope that the words may give me courage. 

~~
Well, firstly, what an amazing writer he is. No body can come closer to his style of writing!

and yes, to think, there will be much more and worse on those mountains far beyond our scope of sight.

to accept, to let go, to fear, to risk, to worry, to cry, to think, to wonder, to live and much more!

Srik

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meaningful life

Excerpt from the book The Snow Leopard by Peter Matthiessen

the only meaningful life is a life that strives for the individual realization - absolute and unconditional - of its own particular law... to the extent that a man is untrue to the law of his being... he has failed to realize his life's meaning. 

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Am just getting deeper into the law!

Srik

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the rain forest

Excerpt from the book Peter Matthiessen's Reader:

The rain forest communities are the oldest on earth, with hundreds of insect species specific to each of the many species of its trees. Almost half of the earth's living things, many as yet undiscovered, live in this green world that is shrinking fast to a small patch on the earth's surface. Man has already destroyed half of the rain forests, which disappear at an ever increasing speed, and a mostly unknown flora and fauna disappear with them. Therefore, at every opportunity, we explore the forest, and often I go out alone, for walking in solitude through the dim glades, immersed in silence, one learns a lot that cannot be learned in any other way.

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Very true. Wonder how many have gone into depression?!

Srik

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accomplishment?

Excerpt from the book Peter Matthiessen's Reader

The finality of extinction is awesome, and not unrelated to the finality of eternity. Man, striving to imagine what might lie beyond the long light years of stars, beyond the universe, beyond the void, feels lost in space; confronted with the death of species, enacted on earth so many times before he came, and certain to continue when his own breed is gone, he is forced to face another void, and feels alone in time. Species appear and, left behind by a changing earth, they disappear forever, and there is a certain solace in the inexorable. But until man, the highest predator, evolved, the process of extinction was a slow one. No species but man, so far as is known, unaided by circumstance or climatic change, has ever extinguished another, and certainly no species has ever devoured itself, an accomplishment of which man appears quite capable!

~~

Sigh! what a beautiful way of expressing the sadness!

Srik

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