Since our return from walking north along the ridges of Vermont’s Green Mountains, we have been ruminating over Aldo Leopold’s essay, Thinking Like A Mountain:
Leopold slightly misquotes from Thoreau’s essay “Walking”; the context for the correct quote (DP emphasis added) adds tinder for the fire.
We are reminded of the lines from Robinson Jeffers’ Bloody Sire:
JONATHAN STALLING: SOLITARY HOWL # 2
As for philosophers who think like mountains, we turn to the writings of Arne Naess, who we would like to imagine is still out there somewhere in the north of Norway, despite all these troubling and persistent rumors of his death.
The below video is worth a close listen, for the noble philosopher’s quietly deep sort of loving howl against the ecocidal wind:
PHILOSOPHY AND THE MOUNTAIN
And then, before we get carried away by the Naessian flow, we hear Jeffers again:
Desperado Philosophy 