Massif

I love the term massif. The word plunges straight from my brain to the pit of my stomach. It holds everything I know about this mass of the earth's crust, which isn't very much.

I started this blog so that I could learn more about her, but I'm not naturally inclined to absorb facts. I tend to forget them immediately if I don't write them down. From my research (and the sticky I left for myself on my desktop), I know that the Blanca Massif includes four peaks, and that the highest -- Blanca, herself -- hits 14,285 feet in less than 5 miles.

When I think of the word massif, let it settle in my mind, I see an aerial view. I see the topography from above, absorb the vertiginous grandeur of her ongoing creative act. She is still in the process of being born.

Because "mass" is a verb of action as well as a noun. Slow, steady, deliberate action, like the movements of the Earth that are creating her, inch by inch, century by century.

When I first moved from California to Colorado, I ached for the ocean. I felt landlocked in Boulder, where I lived at the time. I was afraid I'd eventually suffocate with the sea so far away.

Then one foggy morning, I left my apartment and glanced up at the Flatirons, which loomed over my neighborhood, and I realized that these misted, motionless vertical slabs and peaks were not motionless at all. Like the crests of giant waves, they were rising and subsiding -- only their trajectories required eons to complete. The ocean was with me; it would always be with me, and in the massive crests and crevices of the mountains, I can capture its immense, rolling space with my finite human eye.