Living One’s Matterhorn

We are born at the base of a Sisyphus like mountain ,

not knowing the mountain is ours.

It’s jagged silhouette etched into the soul

before the soul knows how to speak.

We begin in red, not the fury of fire,

but the pulse of birth, the raw ache of becoming.

It stains the snow beneath our first steps,

a blush of courage before we know what courage costs.

The climb continues in silence,

feet blistered by inherited terrain,

hands grasping for holds carved by ancestors

who vanished into the fog before they could name the summit.

Soon comes blue, the deep kind, not sky, but abyss.

It pools in our lungs as we gasp for meaning,

a quiet grief that teaches us how to listen to silence.

Each breath is thinner than the last, each choice a crevasse.

Some leap it, some fall, some build bridges from broken ribs and call it wisdom.

Yellow flickers in the distance, a sun we chase but never touch.

It is hope, sometimes foolish, sometimes holy.

It warms the frostbitten edges of our doubt and dares us to keep climbing.

We carry myths like oxygen tanks,

stories of gods who scaled the impossible

and left footprints in the snow that melt when we get too close.

But the mountain is not just glistening primary.

It softens in moments, a wash of lavender when memory returns,

the scent of a mother’s voice echoing through thin air.

There are avalanches of memory, rockslides of regret,

and the occasional eagle that circles above us,

reminding us we are not prey unless we forget to look up.

Peach glows in the tent at dusk,

when we share stories with strangers

who feel like old friends because pain makes kin of us all.

Some pitch tents to shelter halfway, call it peace.

Others keep climbing,

even when the stars go out and the wind speaks in tongues.

Mint whispers in the wind when we forgive ourselves for the falls,

for the detours, for the days we mistook stillness for failure.

To live one’s Matterhorn is not to conquer it, but to become it.

To let the cold sculpt your marrow,

to let the altitude teach you how to breathe in absence.

And rose, not red, but the tender kind blooms at the summit, if we reach it.

It is not triumph, but gentleness. Not conquest, but clarity.

And when the summit comes, if it comes,

it is not a flag we plant but a silence we enter,

a view so vast it erases the need for names.

We are left living one’s Matterhorn by remembering the blood of crimson,

The weeping in indigo, and laughing in lemon’s usherance into ther rest of pastel grace.

Yes…

It is to become a palette no one else can paint,

a landscape of feeling etched into the sky.