Trail to Peak: The Adventurous Path
Hiking, Exploring, Travel & Adventure
1000 Year Old Mountain Poetry
Mountains move people, stirring their hearts and their emotions. Whether it be to fear or to love, to revere or to study, it seems that, the world over …and throughout time eternal… mountains have inspired passionate responses in humanity. In this part of my blog I plan to collect some of my favourite ancient poems and quotes about the landscape I so love….
Ancient Chinese Poetry
“In the mountains all is pure, all is calm; All complication is cut off. Rare are they who know to listen; Happy they who possess wisdom.
If the cold wind stings and bothers you, Sit in the sun: it is always warm there. Its rays burn like flames, While, opposite, in the shade, all is frost and snow.
One pauses on ledges, one climbs to the foot of high clouds; One sits in the depths of a gorge, one passes windy grottos. Here is the realm of harmony and joy, Where the past and the present become eternal.”
HSIEH LING-YÜN A.D. 433
I discovered this poem taking a FREE online course, called “Mountains 101,” through the University of Alberta. If you have the time, I highly recommend it. They cover so many topics, from a scientific understanding of weather and glaciation and the geologic processes involved in mountain formation through to a literary and historical understanding of the ways that mountains have influenced cultures the world over. The photographic images they display on the screen are incredible, and the info, fascinating.
https://www.coursera.org/learn/mountains-101
2 Comments on “1000 Year Old Mountain Poetry”
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Trail to Peak: The Adventurous Path 
I’m also working through this course, and thought this poem was really interesting. And the course is excellent!!
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I found it really fascinating the way people in Asia found mountains inspiring and things of great beauty, versus fear-inducing or as inconvenient obstructions, a full thousand years before they did in Europe.
Though I like all lessons in this course, I think this one…. the one that looks at how we imagine mountains, the way it enters our way of conceptualizing and thinking about them, to be the best. It’s the one that gave me the most to think about… versus a simple transference of information, the way the others have been.
I’m glad you are enjoying the course too… and thanks for stopping by my blog!
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