We started up the mountain in the early dawn as the stars bled out, their diffusion spreading a reluctant vanilla. The morning's heavy eyelids fluttered as our movements whispered into curtained air. We begin a long pendulum of ascent. A drop of molasses torpidly pulling its way down a gravy boat. Our breathing deep and rhythmic and easy as melody to a metronome, our feet catching a tick tok beat on the frozen ground. My gaze cuts hard lines into the ground, carefully supervising the methodical operation of my feet. Peripheral coming and passing a slow blur. Thoughts collect and disperse like sand deposited and disturbed by waves. Sweat collects in briny gumdrops across my bowed brow (but not bereaved). My shirt is a warm gluey rag underneath my arms and on my back. Coming through a cluster of verdant pines, prickly and bristled, the steep slope opens up in a large arc around jagged turrets of rock to reveal the second stage of the hike. The face of the mountain looms, yet a mile or so off. An impossibly static wave, dissembling movement as my eyes momentarily blur in a wash of sweat and dirt. Trees ring the large angular mountain face like a monk's tonsured dome, supplicating providential proximity. Touch the crown. Tired, clumsy metaphors long since hackneyed lumbered through my thoughts as I remember previous excursions with my dad, family, and friends. Silence is interrupted and quieted by our labored exhalations pushed and pulled. With intention we start towards the main slope frosted with snow. Trees like scarred veterans of being stand watch against watching, standing above all as quiet, un-silenced sentinels of their own decomposition. Rocks large and small strewn around the bases of the trees. The trees' roots' growth a compliant, friendly neighbor living beside and around the would-be rocky combatants for soil, respecting bounds. Spreading slowly, resisting rivalry as they gently work around the rocks, careful not to disturb, even extending themselves out towards them, digging in to the soil in which they lie, providing fingered matrices against erosion. A loving kindness.