‘I lift up my eyes to the mountains;
where is my help to come from?’
(Psalm 121:1)
Those words have long been entwined in my thoughts and experiences of hills and mountains; entwined in such a way that the answer runs through me even before the words of the question surface into consciousness. They always speak, not of some far off vantage point, whether remembered or merely imagined, but of the particular place in which I find myself at that moment. Both question and answer surround me and settle as an omnipresent cloak spreading over every piece of un-peopled high ground I have ever seen. At each such moment, those words could have been written for the heights to which my eyes have been raised, or upon which I stand.
So it was for the beautifully forested Pyrenean mountainsides among which I spent time as summer gave way to autumn. As soon as I first set foot on the steep path leading up through the wooded shadows behind the house in which I stayed, all views of the mountains disappeared and I was enveloped in one of those frequent and impossible to brush aside invitations that call me to acknowledge the presence of something far greater than mere coincidence; something beckoning me away from the superficial, the momentary and the false, to an absorption into the profound, the enduring and the true.
I had packed one unnecessary item before leaving home. I brought it to enable my expected answer to be an honest one when asked if I had packed a book among the other so-called “essentials”. In any such place, the woods, the streams and the hills are the only ‘book’ I need. They are filled not only with pages, but many lines to every page, and with every word pointing to truths written between those lines.
Words and meanings, and awareness of truths beyond all words, calling ever deeper and ever higher along the paths and gullies and ridges, while echoes of the well known words which greet me on stepping through my own door run through me – “Bidden or not bidden, God is present.”
I did, however, read the first page of the preface of the book, and it provided me with words to lean against my awareness of God’s unbidden presence; they stood as book-ends between which I later gathered my own experiences while staying there.
‘Every sound (is) a voice, every scrape or blunder (is) a meeting – with Thunder, with Oak, with Dragonfly. ... Direct sensuous reality, in all its more-than-human mystery, remains the sole solid touchstone for an experiential world now inundated with electronically-generated vistas and engineered pleasures ...’ (The Spell of the Sensuous. David Abram.)
I, and those with me, were blessed in remarkable ways during our forest and mountain walks, but one hour in particular left us almost speechless. It was a previously unimaginable experience conjured from the natural world around us, manifested for us, and carrying a message to us – to one of us in particular, I believe. I gave no details of it in the visitors’ book where we stayed; it did not belong there, just as it does not belong here; but what I did feel compelled to leave was an expression of my hope that others will search beyond the superficial attractions around them; that they will go deep. The truth awaits anyone visiting those peaks and forests, and it longs to provide visitors with their own intimate experiences of relationship within it.
In being drawn to raise their own eyes to those hills about them, may they also find the answer to that same question; and may their time there be spent – as mine had been – in wonder, and in peace.
And may anyone reading this be led to listen for the voice which whispers to each one of us.
Be still; be quiet; be content and at peace; partake of the banquet of words to be read and heard in the streams, the trees, the mosses, the trails of mist and cloud, all tumbling down as music, rolling across and caressing the hillsides with overflowing truth.
‘My help comes from The Lord who made heaven and earth.’
(Psalm 121:2)
