Yesterday was a perfectly lovely day, and I decided to take the dog up Corndon Hill, the highest mountain (ahem, it's just a little pimple really) in east Wales. In the old days (ie pre-chemo) I could do this walk from the house, there and back in about 3.5 hours, but sadly I don't have the puff or muscles to do that at present, not to mention the perfect excuse of the dog's arthritis and increasing years, so I drove to the base of the hill, which makes the walk not much more than an hour, but with quite a steep climb. I've only been doing level walks recently so this was going to be a challenge. I told myself to approach the walk mindfully, noticing my breathing, the silence, the view (fantastic - on a good day you can see as far as Snowdon, but yesterday was a bit hazy), the sunshine and occasional cloud, and best of all the pure unadulterated white snow, of which there was enough to sink my boots into, and at that time of the morning no one else had set foot on it. I took the hill slowly, counting 100 breaths at a time, and stopping to take in the view whenever I felt like it. There was no hurry, and if I didn't make the summit it didn't matter. The point was to do it mindfully and not think about anything else except putting one foot in front of the other, and breathing. I did reach the top though, eventually, where there is a cairn on which I leave a stone each time I go up there, and a bench to sit on. The dog sat beside me and we contemplated the 360 degree view, and the movement of cloud shadows across the landscape, in silence and companionship. It was a perfect moment.
I have a thing about mountains. Have never wanted to be a climber, but I love walking and being in high places, and I love reading about climbing. Mt Everest was conquered on my 3rd birthday, and my earliest memory is of hearing the news - more important to me then and since than the coronation, on the day of which that news was released, and I have long been gripped by the tragic story of the loss of Mallory and Irvine in the 1924 expedition. Those early climbers were so brave, in their plus-fours, their leather shoes, their hopelessly flimsy little tents, climbing into the unknown! Of course they were survivors of the First World War, so they had stared death in the face and no longer feared it, or anything. On Friday we saw the original film of that adventure, 'The Epic of Everest', which has been beautifully restored by the British Film Institute with extraordinary (though sometimes rather intrusive) music by Simon Fisher Turner, and that sent me back to 'Into The Silence' by Wade Davies, my best read of the last few years, which is all about those early expeditions. All this, plus the realisation that I may not actually die this year or next, has reinforced my determination to go back to Nepal and see the Himalaya again. So I'm going to regard my tiny achievement of getting up Corndon Hill as the first step in that journey.
One last thing, which ties neatly together the ideas of mindfulness and mountains. I have been reading 'Mindfulness for Health', a collaboration between Danny Penman and Vidyamala Burch, both of whose books I've recommended in an earlier blog entry. This book is aimed particularly at people who suffer chronic pain and illness and includes a CD of meditations read by Vidyamala who has a lovely voice. But that's by the by. She mentions at the beginning of one chapter that a journalist asked the survivors of the 1924 Everest expedition why they were going to continue the quest after the deaths of Mallory and Irvine. 'The price of life is death' was the reply.
