Immensity

Beneath the sky of Cantabria, mountains rise that speak to us of other times. Pause for a moment to consider how we live, what we long for, why we hurry. While all this happens, these mountains remain roughly as they were before our concerns began. Water flows leisurely through their cracked walls, eroding them, but the mountain knows that rain will fall again, depositing the particles that were taken from it. It waits in silence, without complaint. Animals graze on its pastures, a practice centuries old, yet the mountain understands that as long as its soils remain fertile, the grass will inevitably grow back. Why fret over something whose solution is a given? The mountain knows everything that has happened and can also imagine everything that will happen. A mountaineer playing at adventure will tread upon it. Shepherds will bring their flocks to feed. The animals, seemingly ungrateful, will defecate on it, yet they are nourishing its soils once more, so the cycle can repeat again and again, harmlessly. Lovers will picnic on its gentler slopes with grapes, cheeses, and wines, perhaps conceiving children whom the mountain will see decades later on a family outing, remembering that glorious day when mountain and humans had their communion and it bore abundant fruits. Thousands of photographers have captured these landscapes, but not all felt the same in doing so, just as many may have hung a similar photo in their living room, but none like this one. This photo doesn’t just decorate; it transcends. It doesn’t merely adorn; it purifies the air around it.