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Have you ever paused to consider that mountains have secret names? Names that loom loose on lichen lips and cascade off valley walls like an echo roaring down a basalt cheek. Names that rest peacefully in silence under a weighted blanket of sedimentary sandstone. Names that never reach the alluvial lowlands, living out their days on limestone peaks and granite spires with just a few bristlecone pines to tell their stories to. Names as ephemeral as a vernal pool and as evanescent as a sundial lupine closing up shop for the season on midsummer eve.  Men will give names to mountains and mountains will say “yeah sure, that’s it” with a wink and a shrug. Mountains know better than to give themselves up so easily. 

I had a book of TS Eliot poems as a child, Old Possum's Book of Practical Cats. There’s one poem in particular that still haunts me to this day, and even though it’s what folks might call a ‘nonsense poem’, as I’ve grown older and wiser and thoroughly more taoist, I’ve come to value nonsense as a virtue. The poem is called “The Naming of Cats,” and in it Eliot discusses the importance of naming cats, and through this skillful inquiry he comes to the conclusion that cats have three types of names.

(Cont’d below)



Book Rec: The Selected Poems Of Li Po, David Hinton