The Spiritual Importance of Mountains — Ben Horne and Gil Weiss Died Climbing Palcaraju Oeste  — Had We Had Asked Them Beforehand, They Might Well Have Said that Such an End Would Be Okay

© 2012 Peter Free

 

30 July 2012

 

 

Mountains grab your soul, if you are one of those born to feel them

 

It was not a surprise to read in the Washington Post that Ben Horne thought this way:

 

If Ben Horne had summed up his life in one quote, it might have been his favorite one from Russian climber Anatoli Boukreev:

 

“Mountains are not stadiums where I satisfy my ambition to achieve, they are the cathedrals where I practice my religion.”

 

The deeply spiritual 32-year-old Annandale native believed in hiking and mountain climbing as ways to be closer to God, according to his family.

 

© 2012 Marissa Evans, Annandale climber Ben Horne, killed in Peru accident, was deeply spiritual, friends say, Washington Post (29 July 2012) (paragraph split and reformatted)

 

 

Maria Brocchetto (of CNN) wrote about Gil Weiss and Ben Horne, here

 

Marilia Brocchetto, 2 American climbers found dead in Peruvian mountains, CNN (29 July 2012)

 

There is a touchingly familiar mountaineering portrait of both climbers attached to the CNN article.

 

 

The spiritual message is not just about doing what one loves

 

It is about experiencing the larger.  Entering an active, but meditative silence.

 

 

Nor is it exclusively about climbing and adventuring

 

There is something in the air and terrain, at higher elevations, that sucks many of us in.  For mountain people, you do not have to be a climber or adrenalin junkie to feel it.

 

Death and Beyond, and the energy that goes with both, are there.  Just beyond reach.

 

 

Paradox

 

None of this means that fear and physical suffering are not significant parts of mountain (or wilderness) experience.

 

Even mundane excursions into even slightly remote terrain remind me how dependent most of us are on humanity’s intricately supporting networks.

 

 

A note on happenstance

 

Today, many of us want to know what happened to make Ben and Gil fall.

 

My boringly ordinary life provides the most probable answer — unavoidable happenstance.

 

I am increasingly aware that even the most seemingly improbable glitches pop up every day in even the most mundane of activities.  If something can go awry, it almost certainly will.  Many of these instances cannot be foreseen or guarded against.

 

Constant practice of meditative awareness helps us see this aspect of reality.

 

We are emphatically not in full control of our lives.

 

 

The moral? — Meaning and meaninglessness, simultaneously, underlie “peaks” experience

 

There is an exquisitely tender sadness to Ben Horne’s and Gil Weiss’s deaths.

 

That, too, is part of the mountain paradox.