Physical Mountain, Spiritual Mountain
During our vacation in Ladakh, I was blown away by the Himalayas. It is not just their height that was so impressive, it was also the fact that they are seemingly endless. And to think I was just seeing a tiny part of the range when the Himalayas stretch for thousands of kilometers. I was awestruck by the physical mountains, their height, their ruggedness, their snow-capped beauty, and the visibility of the power of the erosive forces – first, along the slopes where the snow had melted and flown down year after year for millennia and carved paths through those hard rocks; and second, at the foot of the mountain, where the water accumulated and form a river that then cuts across rocks as it flows onward. One truly understands that phrase to convey difficulty, “a mountain to climb”, only against a backdrop like this. For some reason, though I am neither religious nor spiritual, all this reminded me of a passage from Robert Pirsig’s Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maint...