Tag: travelwriting

Nature

on leaping reticulations…

History, like beauty, depends largely on the beholder, so when you read that, for example, David Livingstone discovered the Victoria Falls, you might be forgiven for thinking that there was nobody around the Falls until Livingstone arrived on the scene. -Desmond Tutu      The fading light is like a steam iron, smoothing over the corrugations …

Mountains, Nature

on cold visuals…

Faeries, come take me out of this dull world, For I would ride with you upon the wind, Run on the top of the dishevelled tide, And dance upon the mountains like a flame. – W.B. Yeats, The Land of Heart’s Desire We stray too far, in the simple act of subsistence that seems almost …

Mountains, Nature

postulates on divinity…

Divnity atop Kandi Galu Notch (~3,600 mts), Great Himalayan National Park, Himachal Pradesh India

Oh, these vast, calm, measureless mountain days, days in whose light everything seems equally divine, opening a thousand windows to show us God. – John Muir the leitmotif of any mountain, any protrusion that can make its surroundings feel insignificant, would unarguably be divinity… the sanctitude offered by the higher climes more often that not …

Mountains

A pore on moraines

…she learned words that rolled from her tongue when no one was listening. Firns and striations. Cirques and moraines. Adulation. Sublimation. She fell asleep to their music, and she woke to it. Chatter marks, eskers, and drumlins. Truncated spurs. Corries and tarns. Kames. Eolian loess. Katabatic winds… – Deb Vanasse, Cold Spell Moraines are what …

Mountains, Nature

On mist reveries…

Landscapes with mist, Bada Bhangal Trek, Dhauladhar Himalayas, Himachal Pradesh, India

Romanticism is one of those luxuries that evolution seems to have bestowed upon us once the issues of subsistence and food chain were dealt with… ask it to pump up the adrenalin for a daredevilry, or cough up some dopamine for a ruminating poem, and seldom shall it fail to oblige… the philosophy of spiritual …

Mountains

The man on the top…

Saketi Top, Great Himalayan National Park, Himachal Pradesh, India

Spotting a wisp of romanticism, or the divine, in the cold gust of a glacial wind takes a sarcastic imbecile, or the blessed benign… the rest have the customary defence of mumbling cuss words through the parched parchment of a throat… despite the kaleidoscopic nature of human dispositions, the elements — when in an insistent …

Mountains, Nature

on druggets…

Meadows of Bhadpal, Dhauladhar Himalaya, Himachal Pradesh

…How does the Meadow-flower its bloom unfold? Because the lovely little flower is free Down to its root, and, in that freedom, bold… –William Wordsworth, A Poet! He Hath Put his Heart to School Meadows are perhaps the most common pre-conceived imagery of a beautiful landscape… the gently rollicking undulations of grass inspire ballads on …

Mountains

a swansong of the sun…

A riot of colours at Dunagiri Peak, Uttarakhand…

The sky ambles blue, broods black and bleeds white… look at any high mountain panorama and you’d see the analogy ticking away incessantly through dawn and dusk, that play of shadows and light, of heat and cold, of hope and despair, the quintessential play of yin and yang if one were to ponder, or suffer, …