Читать книгу A Healing Legend: Wisdom from the Four Directions - Garry Flint - Страница 5

THINGS change, that’s the way it is in the mountains— that’s the way it is everywhere. Sometimes things in nature change very slowly and cannot be easily seen, like the trees growing in the forest. Sometimes things change on a regular basis, like the day-to-day living of a squirrel and baby birds growing up. Sometimes things change very quickly, then settle to a new way of being and don’t change for a long time. That is where our story begins...

A long time ago, a great glacier covered the peaks and valleys of a mountain range. For thousands of years, the movement of the glacier ice wore away the loose soil and softer rock along the highest crest. Eventually this created the towering rocky walls of a circular valley near the top of one of the peaks. When the glacier melted at the end of the last ice age, the ragged stone walls of the cirque were revealed, making the peak look a lot like the indented crown of an old-fashioned ranger’s hat.

Winter and spring, the water on the walls froze and melted repeatedly, breaking off many chunks of rocks. Most of the chunks of rock that fell away got caught up in the soft soils of the alpine meadows or rolled farther down the mountain where they became stuck behind trees or other rocks. And there they remained, seemingly unchanged forever. However, some of the largest chunks rolled all the way down to the bottom of the valley and ended up in the riverbed.

Over time, the f low of the river water changed the stones. Some were worn as smooth as the inside of a bathtub. Some of them rolled around in the current until they were broken into pebbles, then into even smaller pebbles and finally ground to sand, all the while moving further down the stream. In this way, a goodly amount of the mountaintop, mostly in the form of fine sand and silt, had traveled all the way to the ocean. And the ocean was hundreds of miles away.

Then, on no particular day, one large boulder cracked off the stone walls far above the valley and rolled down the steep mountainside to settle into a shaky balance on a mess of rubble just above the river. The very weight of the rock’s great size held it into place, jammed against many other smaller rocks. It was bigger than a house and leaned at an odd angle, over hanging the valley, where it remained for thousands of years while the rest of the valley, and indeed the world, changed around it.

The broad river valley below the rock was a special place. It was sheltered and faced south, exposing the land to the warming rays of the sun, even in winter. And it was one of the first spots to melt out every spring, making it a good place for all living plants and animals. When this unusual valley was discovered, it became a popular winter home for the first peoples of this land.

The people were special too, having learned to live from what nature offered. Their customs and their ways of doing things were based on knowledge gained through the experience of many generations. Part of that knowledge was the importance of working for the good of all and thus ensuring the survival of the whole nation. For many generations they wintered in this place under the boulder, setting up their lodges year after year. The valley floor offered good grazing for their horses and the forest was rich with game that they hunted for food. Wood was plentiful to build lodges and to keep the fires burning in the short, cold days of winter.

Every spring the people moved on to a new place. It was their way to move about with the seasons. Doing so allowed the winter camp to be cleaned and healed by nature’s forces so it would be ready for the next winter. Eventually though, they came no more. Times had changed.