Walking Down

The 18th is the last night here. After that, the early leaving, the road south, then east.

Something came past me this afternoon. Two mountains. I won't quote it — it was the kind of thing that gets passed hand to hand, and the wrapping isn't the point. The shape under it stayed.

A man climbs two mountains. The first is the one he was handed. He climbs it well. He hits every mark on the way up. He reaches the top and finds the view was never his.

The second has no trail. No one is watching. He builds the footing as he goes.

I read it on the fourth-to-last day of three months in a garden, on my way to an actual range of mountains.

The first mountain I know. I have climbed it most of my life. Built the thing, hauled the thing, got the thing to the summit — for. Always for. For the family. For the work. For the people whose needing me was the rope I climbed on.

A garden does not let you do that for long. You do not feed the soil to be needed by it. You feed it, or it stops feeding you. There is no version where the soil applauds.

Sixty-four years to learn that. And a fork.

Here is the part the passed-around version had right, and it is the part that costs.

The hard mountain was never the second one. It was coming down off the first.

Coming down means holding two true things at once — the climbing was real, and the direction was wrong. The strength was real. The summit was someone else's. A life that read well from the outside and sat wrong from the inside.

In four days I come down off this one. The train goes up into real mountains after that — I am not finished with the image, and the image is not finished with me. The old line says: escape to the mountain. It never meant the rock. It meant the place in yourself you climb to when the plain behind you is burning.

I am not turning around to watch it burn.

Down first. Then up.

Charity … seeketh not her own.
— 1 Corinthians 13:4–5

Day 81 — Phase 12 — Ego / Other — Liver — Jasper — 1 Corinthians 13
Gut Nisdorf, Mecklenburg-Vorpommern, Baltic Coast
© 2025–2026 Michel Garand | A Pilgrim's Fitness Plan | CC BY-SA 4.0
stewardship@ubec.network