07/28/2026
The mountains are calling me again.
They do not call in words. They call the way cold calls to breath, the way height calls to something low in the chest that has been sitting too long, folded too small.
Look at them: five sharp voices rising out of the same black throat of earth, wrapped in ice the color of held breath. They do not ask to be noticed. They simply stand, the way truth stands — unbothered by whether you were looking.
The sky above them is a slow riot of blue and white, clouds moving the way old thoughts move, circling, reshaping, never quite settling. But the peaks do not move with them. That is the first thing the mountains teach: everything above you may churn and drift, opinions and weather and worry, and still you can stand exactly where you are, sharpened rather than shaken by it.
You have felt the call before. Everyone who has ever stood at the bottom of something enormous has felt it — not an invitation, exactly, more like a low note struck somewhere behind the ribs. Come up. Come see what you look like from a colder, clearer place.
The black shadow between each summit is not absence. It is the crease where one struggle ends and the next begins, the narrow dark seam a person has to cross to reach the next brightness. No peak stands alone. Notice how they lean on one another, shoulder to shoulder, ridge to ridge — the tall one in the center flanked on both sides, none of them solitary in their height. Maybe that, too, is part of the call: not go be great alone, but go be great among others who are also reaching.
The ice on their faces catches light the sky isn't even giving directly — it makes its own brightness out of what little it's handed. That is a kind of stubbornness worth learning. You do not need abundant light to shine. You only need to be positioned toward whatever light exists, and hold still long enough to catch it.
So when the mountains call, they are not calling you away from your life. They are calling you up into a truer version of it — the one where you stand jagged and unhidden, snow-bright against your own hard black stone, unwilling to be smoothed into something smaller just to be comfortable.
You do not have to answer today. But you should know: the call does not tire. It does not fade with distance or time. It will still be there, low and certain, on the morning you finally decide to climb.
The peaks are patient. They have always been patient.
They are simply waiting for you to stand as tall as you already are.
