Mountain in the heart

                     

A book about the mountains,

which scents of philosophy,

has the flavor of life

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Author's Note

Mountain in the heart is a book of poetry that speaks of the mountain. I always wanted to write poems about the mountain, since I was teen and started discovering that places. From my first step, several years ago, I felt a kind of feeling or perhaps it would be better to call it a predisposition towards the mountain. What, at that time, I couldn't understand was what was related with that predisposition. I always felt like a push, a push for the attending of those places, with the result that each return home, that feeling didn't dozing off for the recently completed attending, but each time I felt an increasing a desire to return over there. Those places, those spaces, inspired me. Slowly I began to realize that while I found a physical benefit, on the other hand was even stimulated my thinking, my mind. So I began to write. First stories, but the impression was immediately that of a mere report mountaineering and this did not assuage and flanked my feelings. So I came to poetry and the words began to flow like spring water. The more I went to the mountains, the stream acquired more strength, impetuosity. Suddenly, ten years ago, the death has approached me and tried to get me, in vain, but in the end he let me go. I do not know why, but I like to think it has seen something in me and has preferred to let me go again to the mountains. For feeling them again and tell about. One day, quite recently, I found the hundreds of poems that I had picked up and a slight glow began to enlighten my mind and my heart. All that I had written over time could have been ordered in a certain way, and finally the collection took shape and seemed an ascension path. I began to wonder if it had happened only to me to try similar feelings and started with little research, which soon led to the vastness of history, literature and philosophy. I realized that by several thousand years the most diverse civilizations were culturally, religiously and mystically attracted to the mountains. Characters superficially studied in high school, have proven to be aligned to myself, similar in my own mind, almost accomplices during a metaphorical mountain climb, like climbing's companions. Here was the physical size of the mountain which was dressing of the eerie tones of the Mountain mystique, the discovery about own intellectual limit, the proximity to her which I already had granted me freedom: the death. In a conceptual metaphysical framework, arrived in a rather impetuous way, are hearing the words of philosophers whom for thousands of years had theorized purifier ideals about the mountains. Every step taken has become both physical and mental experience. The mountain revealing path of becoming, culminating in a new awareness. Humility of intellect and spirit, awareness than knowledge of not knowing. The mountain attending has become for me experience of philosophy, or rather a philosophical way. Impossible to summarize this idea better than how Nietschze did: philosophy, is the free choice of living between the ice and the high peaks. High peaks, to overcome laziness and suggest the abandonment. The discovery unthinkable for a meeting place, a common apex between philosophies,  eastern and western cultures. The physical difficulty for implementing a mental asceticism, that alone would not bring anything, if accompained of an useless, cumbersome and material luggage. Here is the suggestion of reasoned abandonment then, from everything is common ground intellectual luggage, which obscures the horizon of new, impediment towards that same light that the platonic slave, born in the cave, must follow to attain true freedom. Example exciting for me was Petrarch, who at the very top of the Ventoux, caught the light of the Augustine's words and began from that moment a very different type of climbing. The human being is conditioned by time and matter, as indicated by Heidegger in  being and time, and it is only when mind abandons this kind of dogma of existence, then thought, can begin a real ascetic ascent. Accompanying like a mountain guide, the spirit towards the abyss of his own limitations, handing to man the only existing instrument which would be able to allow the physical subjectivity of all things, a real objectivity, the death. A metaphorical death of thought, the zeroing, the nothingness. Anything to do with the twilight of a certain poetic currents, but a reasoned waiver, the first step of a new renaissance. To reach the summit, really empty inside, bare of everything and therefore capable of grasping everything comes from the elevation. An absorbing not by the final dissolution, but by a valley return, with a new mood, especially aware to exist in a changing existence and without end: physical, mental and spiritual.

Difficult, challenging, perhaps unlikely, but feasible, scalable.

I now begin to realize what it was that feeling of predisposition: an intrisic desire to the soul to seek the most complete natural absorption, own dissolution and recomposition, in other words, a full and perhaps heavenly harmony. Only at the end of such an arduous journey, the instinctive man can approach the mountain more difficult that each can imagine, and get himself out, not conqueror or winner, but robbed of humanity and finally free. Free to be a person. A new person.

Find widest sense, in conclusion, the words of Guido Rey, a member along with Ugo De Amicis of that mountaineering period, congenial to me, named mystical mountaineering,  phrase with which I exactly open the preface of the book. Proper citation, who exhorts us to take the first step, because in the end it is not necessary reach the top at any cost, the waiver could be part of the journey and the ultimate aim could be the not achievement of the summit: "The mountain is made for everybody, not only for climbers: for those who want to rest in the quiet as for those looking in the effort a rest even louder”.

Hence the hope of getting carried away by the mystical effort towards the highest and breahty peaks , knowing that only when the ideal of walk and not of summit will enter in us, then we'll start a real catharsis.