Remembering

"It isn't all those promises that you vow to keep then don't,
It isn't that the world will end but the likelihood that it won't.
O alarm, o wonderful alarm,
Wake me up from remembering..."

I employed my machine today to lose myself in a place of chill and fog. The summit of Mount Donna Buang was reminiscent of La Verna, where once I wandered among millennia-old chapels, through a silent icy forest, before joining the Franciscans in solemn chant. This Boxing Day was like that one except somehow wrong: Winter in Summer.







The tower looked at me through the dense white, almost ominously.



As did other objects and life.



The silence and slow walk through deep fog shifted something inside me.  I was taken back to that monastic Italian winter more than ten years ago.  Something about this place breathed, and I felt its breath in the quiet trees and cold stones. And I felt, too, the different like which has grown in me since.









As I walked, I thought of these words which suggest a journey I had made inwardly, in the years since that day in La Verna:

"He who knows how to breath in the air of my writings is conscious that it is the air of the heights, that it is bracing. A man must be built for it, otherwise the chances are that it will chill him. The ice is near, the loneliness is terrible - but how serenely everything lies in the sunshine! How freely one can breath! How much, one feels, lies beneath one!"