I was listening to this Vanessa Williams song a few days ago, humming along to the lines unfamiliar to me and unabashedly screeching to the lines I was familiar with (as a pitiful attempt to complement the singer’s beautiful voice). (Un)fortunately, by the time the song got to the “For whether we are white or copper skinned / We need to sing with all the voices of the mountains” part, I was already hoarse, so I shut up, and I resigned myself to the fact that all that’s left for me to do was to let the music continue on without my incessant – and pathetic – attempts at falsettos.
And that’s when it hit me.
Really, we still have no idea how to paint with all the colours of the wind.
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Maybe you’ll laugh at this statement. Maybe you’re going to throw up your hands in the air and mutter something along the lines of, “Here we go again, another self-righteous voice on the internet trying to stuff her beliefs down my throat,” and maybe you’re right. Maybe you’re tired of talk like this: another lecture on how we have a duty to this earth and how we owe this planet our lives and how we’re all connected and blah blah blah. Maybe you’re thinking, “What the hell does this kid know?” Maybe you’re saying, “I’m just having fun!” Maybe you’re telling yourself, “This cigarette butt won’t hurt the mountain if I throw it on the ground.” Maybe you’re telling a friend, “Leave your sandwich wrapper there, paper is biodegradable, right?”
And honestly, it’s not like I know a lot, but I’d like to believe that what I do know is important, and maybe – just maybe – what I know deserves to be heard: the Earth’s not ours for the taking.
The Earth is great, and majestic, and beautiful, and it has all we know and all we’ve learned to love in it, and I think that maybe we should try to respect it just a little bit better. And maybe I don’t know much about this planet, and maybe I can’t talk about the depths of the seas or the icebergs or the deserts… but I do know something about the mountains (just a little bit I know about them), and what I’m certain I know is that they’re not mounds of earth translatable to heaps of trash.
And you will say scientific things like biodegradable and turns-to-fertilizer or you will blame other people and say but-so-and-so-did-this-why-don’t-you-scold-them-instead or you will look to the past and say stuff like other-people-have-been-here-before-me or it-was-already-there-when-I-came.
And everyone will do the same. Again and again, and again and again; offering the same reasons, the same justifications, the same excuses.
I cannot speak for other mountains — in fact I may as well only be speaking for myself and for what I believe in (don’t we all?) — but if mountains in the Philippines were to speak, perhaps it would be along the lines of, “What about me?”
We look to mountains as imposing giants — as rocks we climb, as summits we conquer, as trails we traverse. Often, we forget that a mountain has life; is life, in fact. It is home to people, shelter to animals, and a life source to plants. It welcomes visitors as best it can, and, if circumstances are well, it allows these visitors to climb it, to camp in it, and to descend from it.
And yet we still think that it is the mountains that owe us. We still feel self-entitled; we trample on paths meant to be untrodden, we damage plants, we bring home rocks (or write on them), we leave our trash.
And then we get mad when the next time we desire to visit that same mountain, it’s closed. Or it’s too full of people. Or camping’s no longer permitted. Or it’s strewn with litter. And then we groan, completely forgetting (or perhaps choosing to forget) that we’re culprits to the crime.
This is what this entry is, essentially.
This is the rant of a currently disenchanted kid. Of a kid who understands that people need nature to live life fully, but who cannot comprehend why people can be so selfish sometimes so as to forget that they are mere visitors to the mountain.
This is the rant of a kid who is happy that the art of mountaineering has inspired so many and has increased the tourism of many places exponentially, but a kid who is disheartened by the number of trash that now litter our mountains.
This is the rant of a kid who is happy because people yearn quiet moments, but is sad because in yearning for quiet moments, many have decided to transfer their noises up in the peaks, where the voices of the gods residing therein are silenced — to make way for boisterous laughter or alternating shouts of overwhelming emotions.
This is the rant of a kid who once went to a quaint village in the Benguet province and was humbled by the quiet, comfortable lives of those who lived there, but is heartbroken by the fact that those people in that quaint little town now have to cater to thousands of visitors pouring in — not because they don’t want to, but because they can’t. Not when there’s too much tourists, not when they’re spewing too much trash, and especially not when they’re leaving more than emotional baggage behind, but their tissues, and plastic wraps, and paper bags, and food, and cigarette butts, and bottles. Among others.
It all sounds preachy, and it sounds too abstract coming from a voice from the depths of the internet, but here’s a shout out, and hopefully it finds its way to someone’s heart. And even if it doesn’t right now, then maybe it does in the future. If it doesn’t even then, then at least it’s off my chest: let’s be kinder to this planet, and let’s start it off by being kinder to the mountains.
I mean, I guess it’s the least that we could do for the quiet, looming monoliths that made us better humans. It’s what our littleness can do to show our gratefulness to the greatness of this world. It’s the thank you we can give for all the healing we receive when we’re up there praying, or dancing, or singing, or shouting.
And in the end, it’s the best we can do for ourselves now, and for ourselves in the future.
Of perpetual finds 