Think Like a Mountain
Philosopher and ecologist Aldo Leopold said only a mountain has lived long enough to understand the song of a wolf. The thought is from “Thinking Like a Mountain” a short essay in Leopold’s A Sand County Almanac, a book published in 1949 that transformed the environmental movement.
“In wildness is the salvation of the world,” Leopold wrote. “Perhaps this is the hidden meaning in the howl of the wolf, long known among mountains, but seldom perceived among men.”
What would it be like to think like a mountain? Maybe a mountain experiences the world something like we see above in the extremely slow-shutter-speed photograph of a river. A mountain’s experience might help it feel and understand a couple of things we modern, high-shutter-speed humans have a hard time grasping: Everything is process, everything flows; and, all the processes, including what we mistakenly think of as static ‘things,’ are interconnected with all the other processes of the Universe.
John Muir, the 19th Century naturalist, writer, lover of the Sierras, was known as “John of the Mountains” because he thought like mountains thought. He said, “Contemplating the lace-like fabric of streams outspread over the mountains, we are reminded that everything is flowing—going somewhere, animals and so-called lifeless rocks as well as water.” For Muir, even “the stars go streaming through space pulsed on and on forever like blood globules and Nature's warm heart.”
If we’re going to learn to think like a mountain, we could do worse than take a page from Muir’s practice. He said:
This was my method of study. I drifted about from rock to rock, from stream to stream, from grove to grove. Where night found me there I camped. When I discovered a new plant, I sat down beside it for a minute or a day, to make its acquaintance and try to hear what it had to say. I asked the boulders I met, whence they came from and whither they were going.
The same holds when we come across unfamiliar ideas. For us, thoughts seem to come and go faster than the flashes of lightning bugs on a summer night. But a mountain knows the stream of thought. Like Muir did with the plants and boulders, we should sit beside the stream and hear what new ideas have to say.
Another way to say “think like a mountain” is “pay attention.” In The Book of Nature, Barbara Mahany writes:
Peel back the wisdoms of East or West, plumb the canons of any civilization, listen to the thrum of Indigenous truth telling, and there you will find the spiritual practice of paying closest attention. On alert to the visible invisibility.
What Muir knew has been present to human souls from the beginning, as Mahany says. When Muir questioned the boulders, he was following the advice of St. Bernard of Clairvaux, Bernard of the Valley of Light, who told us that “honey may be gathered from stones and oil from the hardest rock.” Bernard was voicing wisdom that had been known for millennia, wisdom still available to us if we’ll listen, and we’d better listen because the global climate crisis makes it imperative that we do.
Aldo Leopold’s hope to think like a mountain grew from an incident in which he and some other hunters spotted a mother wolf and her pups. From lack of attention, from a thoughtlessness that makes one gasp, the group fired a volley of shots at the wolf and killed it. “In those days we had never heard of passing up a chance to kill a wolf,” Leopold wrote. Here’s how he ends the story:
We reached the old wolf in time to watch a fierce green fire dying in her dyes. I realized then, and have known ever since, that there was something new to me in those eyes—something known only to her and to the mountain. I was young then, and full of trigger-itch; I thought that because fewer wolves meant more deer, that no wolves would mean hunters’ paradise. But after seeing the green fire die, I sensed that neither the wolf nor the mountain agreed with such a view.
While still a teenager, I shared Leopold’s trigger-itch. I was on a hunting trip with my father near the Rio Grande, north of a village called Quemado (the name means ‘scorched’ in Spanish). As I walked alone across a shallow valley filled with prickly pear and mesquite, a red fox crossed my path. My mind an ugly blank, I raised my rifle and killed it. Even today, my needless cruelty that day makes my stomach clench. Like Leopold and the wolf, it is the eyes of the fox that stay with me and, I hope, continue to teach me. The fox’s yellow eyes burned into me like tiny suns, not with anger but with sorrow at my loss, not its own.
Many years later, I was walking down a street near a small park in Austin late one night. Halos of fine mist made circles around the streetlights. It was very quiet. From down the street a fox trotted toward me, undisturbed by my presence. It came right up to me and began to dance, bouncing, spinning in circles. Then it paused, looked at me and padded away. I like to think it was checking on my progress.
Tales such as these are everywhere in our diverse traditions. I’m guessing you have some stories of your own. I think we know too well what Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s ancient mariner suffered after impetuously killing an albatross that had guided his ship from an ice pack.
Since then, at an uncertain hour, That agony returns: And till my ghastly tale is told, This heart within me burns.
Coleridge’s Rime of the Ancient Mariner is powerful enough to escape easy summary, but it is in no small part a recognition that we are of Nature, not separate from it or above it with dominion over it. Near the end of the poem, Coleridge’s mariner tells his guest
He prayeth best, who loveth best All things both great and small; For the dear God who loveth us, He made and loveth all.
Coleridge was influenced to some degree by a 9th Century Celtic Christian holy man and scholar named John Scotus Eriugena, who I think of as a kind of early Irish Ralph Waldo Emerson. In his famous Divinity School Address, Emerson said, the soul “invites every man to expand to the full circle of the universe, and will have no preferences but those of spontaneous love.” Eriugena held similar beliefs. He, like Emerson, was a thorn in the side of imperial Christianity, a thorn sharp enough to have his work condemned by the Church in 855 and condemned again centuries after his death.
Eriugena was unfamiliar with the Tao or other ancient Eastern spirituality, but his work shares much of that spirit. Thinking like a mountain, he said the Greek word for God, theos, was derived from the Greek verb meaning to flow. Divine goodness is the essence of the Universe, he said, rejecting the Church’s doctrines of original sin and predestination. Eriugena was a Celt, and he shared their deep attachment to the natural world. Today we might call him a panentheist. The divine is a part of everything.
These masters—Leopold, Mahany, Eriugena, Coleridge, Emerson, and many, many more—can help us learn how to think like a mountain. Mountains teach us too, of course, and so can seas, forests, deserts and stars of the night sky. So can the life of city streets, back yards and urban parks. John Muir told us that, so did St. Bernard of Clairvaux, who said, “More things are learnt in the woods than from books; trees and rocks will teach you things not be be heard elsewhere.”
It’s a simple thing, really, this thinking like a mountain. It’s light-hearted and all about life. It’s not a sober thing. Any mountain will tell you that. Muir said the happiness of such a life is shared with the entire Cosmos. He said, “Every morning, arising from the death of sleep, the happy plants and all our fellow animal creatures great and small, and even the rocks, seemed to be shouting, ‘Awake, awake, rejoice, rejoice, come love us and join in our song. Come! Come!’”
With that kind of deepened awareness we won’t just avoid the thoughtlessness and cruelty that can grow from inattention. We’ll walk with the mountains. Do you doubt that? “To doubt the walking of the mountains means that one does not yet know one’s own walking,” said Dogen, the 13th Century Japanese Zen master. The poet Gary Snyder explains what Dogen means, being careful to let us see this is an every day thing:
His mountains and streams are the processes of this earth, all of existence, process, essence, action, absence; they roll being and nonbeing together. They are what we are, we are what they are…So the blue mountains walk to the kitchen and back to the shop, to the desk, to the stove. We sit on the park bench and let the wind and rain drench us. The blue mountains walk out to put another coin in the parking meter.
We are what they are and they are what we are. That’s the way mountains see it, and that’s the way we’ll see it too when we think like a mountain.