RESONANCES

A PINE FOREST FOR A THOUSAND THOUGHTS

by Sonia Sbolzani

The storm has just abandoned Pinzolo's pine forest, leaving it drenched with autumn warmth. I am reaching it now, at dusk, convinced by a new-born sun that seems indulging and nearly coming back, over there, behind the very mountain it has plunged itself into.
I sit on a bench looking over the stream, in a tranquillity that embraces the rustle of the water and it dissolves it into pure silence.
To charge my eyes and my soul with images offered by this environment is - to me - a sort of spiritual excercise, a training for reaching catharsis, a sort of voluptas inveniendi, of aspiration to discover the Absolute, that divine spark inside and outside of us, which nowhere but in the mountains it is so manifest and clear.
Héctor Tizón, an Argentinian writer, wrote that it is worth filling the heart with images "in order to count life in mountains, gestures, infinite faces and no more in years...". How wonderful it would be to truly count life in mountains! I am 100 mountains, I am 120...me? I am 200...because I have admired 100, 120, 200 times those mountains, I have thought about them, loved them, walked on them, made them mine, as they made me theirs, in a cosmogonic symbiosis. In every myth of the creation of the world, there are mountains; in particular there is always a sacred mountain that links the Earth with the Sky, Man and God, as if it was the highest tree that stretches out roots and branches in the infinite of the two extremes in order to tie them together forever to create life.
I mantain that mountains are what the trees are, the unlimited effort of the Earth to talk to the listening sky. The Olympus for the Greeks, the Tabor for the Jews, the Sacred Mountain for the Celts, the Teuten for the Araucans, the K'uen-luen for the Chinese...everyone with their mountain!
Meanwhile, time runs over the bench, and I realize that now my eyes have expanded towards the Adamello chain, searching for something...
When I am in the mountains, my thoughts cannot help but going up there to those who have died during the war, the First World War: there are mountains, such as the Adamello, that more than others evoque in me this memory.
Never like back then, the man-soldier - not for a fault of the mountain itself, which had been violated in its sacredness, brutally torn into pieces by cannons and trenches - had been fragile and fleeting as an autumn tree leaf. The mountain offered him something more though - I'd like to think - that is its eternal mother's hug, welcoming his mortal remains.
Those mountains appear now to me even more sacred than others, as sacred is the silence, the respect we indeed owe them.
Night has eventually fallen over the fresh and lunar pinewood. The genius loci sweetly calls for my solitude. The crystal shadows on the trees, like soft friends, elevate me, taking my farewell by a magic hand.