Meditations

A tall, half-bold mountain is burning out in the evening gleam of the huge August sun. Green knee-high grass is inhabited by a myriad of exotic insects constantly reminding you of their existence with their plenitude of melodious tunes. You feel the grandeur of your nature, standing barefoot, breathing with air that seems to come through hundreds of filters. However, this grandeur reminds you of your own worthlessness, similarity to all the representatives of flora and fauna on this hill; your personality vanishes without a trace, and instead you become a part of this biological organism, of nature itself. You have done it; you have managed to feel in this life happiness, drive, or perhaps even blessing; it all depends on who you are.

Yellow, red-hot, white clouds are floating beneath you by no means promising rain. Small cabins, like matchboxes, gleam in the sunlight. One can see from this height a host of chaotically scattered and simultaneously interwoven paths that indispensably lead to the same big road or to the boldly sloping hill thickly covered with blackberry bushes. Where are you? Who are you? It doesn’t really matter. You are the God and at the same time you are nothing. In such moments there is no third alternative.

The Hutsul land is one that has been virgin from time immemorial. The land has absorbed its people utterly and forever. This land has never promised anything for certain. It is a land that has always been its own master and like a wild horse did away with anybody trying to wrest its freedom away from it.

It has been a long time since Christian proselytizers brought their faith to this land, but up to the present time you can feel here, like nowhere else, the spirit of paganism, spirit of unrestrained human nature, you feel thirst for life and understand that the human spirit cannot be destroyed. Here nature is not only a phenomenon: it is a substance that one can communicate with, love, and ask for advise. This is a place where human and divine sources all merge together.

After every visit to the Carpathian Mountains you ask God to help you never forget what you saw, heard, or thought of in this land where such beautiful mountains were born and will die some day sinking into the immense depth of the Hutsul land.

P.S. I experienced this feeling in the Sokil Mountains near the Hutsul town of Kosiv.