Mt. Ascutney, seen from West Windsor on a clear day.
Our local OBOD Seed Group is planning to gather on Vermont’s Mt. Ascutney for Lunasa in about a week, and so I scouted locations on the mountain this morning. We’ve had rain in Vermont since Sunday, so not surprisingly fog shrouded the crown of Ascutney, which stands at 3144 feet (958 meters).
Every leaf was dripping, and the blacktop glistened dully as I drove the 4-mile road to summit parking. When I arrived around 10:30 this morning, mine was the only car in the lot, which has spaces for 50.
If you’d told me that with climate shifts parts of New England are destined to become temperate rain forest, this morning at least I would have believed you. More likely we may well face sustained droughts here as elsewhere, but for now, Vermont lives fully up to its name of the Green Mountain state.
I scolded myself for not bringing my camera — next week will have to try to make up for the lapse. But it’s right I did not even try to capture in a frame what I saw and felt. Fern and myrtle, moss and emerald, shades of wet green I have no names for. Bird-calls sounded through the mist, and rivulets sparkled crossing the slabs of stone of the 2/3 mile trail and final 300 feet of ascent.
Fog-weaving at such times needs so little effort. The climb quickens the breath, and the cool air is lush with oxygen. Without the chatter of any human companion as a distraction, and with the fog collapsing the field of vision to just a few dozen yards in any direction, your attention narrows in on step after deliberate step. Light trance comes on like cloud itself. Without thought you can slip through to the “realm next door” between one step and the next, and you may sense the god dreaming on the peak. And rather than needing human action or imagination to weave or conjure vision, the fog itself curtains or reveals what is already there.
For some forty minutes I was alone on the mountaintop. Only on the last leg of the descent back to the parking lot did I meet another solitary hiker, rainjacket tied around his waist as we passed each other.
So did I “meet Lugh”? As a god of storm, sun and high places, he wrapped the mountain with his long arm, as one of his epithets, Lugh Lamhfada, names him. In such places and spaces, the ideas and doubts of rational consciousness don’t intrude. That’s for before, and after.
Even an hour later, with a second or third cloudburst filling the air with its sound, as I stepped out of the car in the parking lot of the medical office for an afternoon eye appointment, perhaps I didn’t “meet the god of storm”. But rain spattered my glasses, ran down my cheeks, wet my bare legs and left my feet squelching in sandals. I quickly pulled my raincoat around me and headed for the entrance.
And there in the waiting room I sat damply, thumbing through a National Geographic magazine, gazing at pictures of endangered birds. I didn’t “meet” those birds, you could argue, and in a sense you’d be right, of course, yet light from images of them reached my eyes and brain, and I know what they look like. I can describe them to you.
I may or may not have “met Lugh”, but water from his storm, and a sense of his long-armed presence continued to accompany me after the appointment as I recalled the climb, and thought about him on the drive home. My clothes are wet, I stood on that mountain, and I can tell you what makes Lugh different from Brighid.
And I am content, “without any irritable reaching after fact and reason” * during such experiences — more than content — whatever I may think or do or say after them. And that proportion — a “during” that is different from a “before” and an “after” — seems to me a good one. Relinquish nothing, gain all.
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IMAGE: Ascutney.
*John Keats in his discussion of “negative capability”.
A Druid Way 