Liberty Mountain

    There stands the mountain, dark and voluminous, where angels fear to tread.  Abandon hope ye who mount it, for the guardians that keep you safe are not permitted amongst the horns of the stratosphere, despite making their abode just above it.  Honeycombed icicles dangling off the chiseled flanks behold pathways open to man, promising light at the summit yet never guaranteeing his reward.  He climbs anyway, forsaking the lives that keep him chained to the machinery of beyond: those places in the land of cities where nature lays subdued and reticent.  Hollow crevasses crack open the forbidden orifice, which grows tendrils of death beneath the roots of its forest, clinging to ancient metamorphoses that never came to fruition.  Bodies of clay burn in the mantle, skeletons of slate corrupt the shield.  The movement of geologic anarchy patrols the Earth, watching all those beings that depend on it for their liberty, destroying that oblivion born of the dilation of time and forever adjusting their perceptions as they meditate upon the plow.  Perfected by the interface of chemical equilibrium, the mountain welcomes the brave climbers who seek to exterminate its immortality and excavate the minerals from its bowels, using them for their own gain in their petty games of business, knowing they could never rob it of its true value, its sacredness, its spirit that reclines all the way from the surrounding valleys to the apex atop its shoulders.  O great heaving mountain!  This is the challenge, the challenge we face.  From Moses on Sinai to Krakauer on Everest there is no shortage of witnesses to your power, your immovable feet; those granite muscles that flex and jive with the rhythm of the cosmos, hyperextended through time and never quite acknowledging its laws.  That you’ve cemented time in the confines of geologic absolution is impressive, Almighty One, but sooner or later even you must erode into the ashes in space.  Even so, just like man, the embers left from your body shall disintegrate into the fabric of entanglement, preserving yourself through the eons, regenerating in formation with other lost souls who have similarly been decoded and placed randomly in the grand design, creating thousands upon thousands of new entities, physical and harmonical.  Indeed, you were already born of astral conglomerates formed by the decay of creations predestined to fall long before the rise of man.  Yet there you stand, eager for his company, teasing him with your illusions of beauty and grandeur, as weightless as an asteroid floating in space yet bound by the gravity of the planet which planted you.  We stand before you as ants would before a human, paralyzed by your power and aware of a faint desire to challenge your heights.  For like our hands that swat at pesky bugs crawling up our legs, the obstacles you disrupt our courage with are many and fatal.  Are you friendly, O mountain?  Do you really welcome us?  Do the slopes of your peak tolerate we critters who climb atop them from your sightless depths?  This we shall see, and this shall we know.