The rider on the mountain

     The east coast doesn't shine the way the west can. Our mountains are older, sunk into the ground from ice ages and further erosion. The peaks of the Rockies and Sierra Nevadas stretch their backbones against thin atmosphere in a way that only those who have seen them can truly understand. Quartz shimmer, limestone sheds and red rock stains. They all come together to the geologist's delight.
      I was very young when I first saw them. In a way, that memory keeps me young forever. The buffalo, the elk, the mountain goats, all of them finding a way to survive in a land that seemed like Mars to me. The severity of the slopes seemed inhabitable, yet these great creatures found a way to survive. They found a way to thrive, despite the predators and precarious conditions, they thrived. Shouldn't that be a lesson?
      When I was young I was a fearless little thing. One day we climbed the craggy ledges of these same slopes. I  got my fingertips dirty while digging into the dirt after seeing some shiny thing. It was only quartz, pretty worthless by economic standards. To me, it was like finding gold. Beauty, like time, is relative. The jutting sharp edges of this rock, that I had discovered, gleamed in the unburdened sunlight. In my hands, it seemed like I had found the greatest gem ever uncovered. It was only that way to me.
    The sunlight hit its jagged, haggard edges while it nestled in my palms. The wind whipped and turned my cheeks bright red. The sight from the edge seemed impossibly grand. From way up there, things looked much smaller. Houses looked like specks of dirt. Trees looked like blades of grass. Next to me, the grown-ups spoke of things that couldn't seem to matter to me for at least a decade or so more. So I sat in solemn silence and solace.
     It's been over a decade and I would still rather think of those mountains than think of what the grown-ups speak of. How do we keep the words inside our mind which trigger the youthful and supposedly infinite feelings of hope and brotherhood that we knew....that we knew before we really knew. Before we really knew, just how much it takes to forsake all the pain and anger that come at sea level, when you're most likely to get flooded by the rest of them, of us, of them. Of it. Of it all.
    Like sitting on a teeter totter, we bellow and inhale the seriousness and ridiculousness of existence. It's not important, it's important, it's stupid...it's smart. If this journey was preemptively smooth and beautiful, who would take it? What would be the point? We follow the precarious path despite the danger and find out whether we are quartz or diamond.
     I hope we are all quartz, something someone else left behind not noticing the beauty of it, only hoping to sell. But one day some hands will pick you up and know how beautiful and important you are. Not to the rest of the world, no, but to the hands who hold you, to the sun the sun that hits your jagged, haggard edges, to the slopes that you have been formed upon, to the ages who knows how long it took you to form, and to all the eyes who spy you knowing, that is something beautiful.