Quotes for the Untamed
When I’m not scouring maps and reading up about new places to explore I love to read the thoughts of fellow mountaineers, climbers, adventurers and explorers. There is a certain kinship to be found when I read words, centuries old, that could have been taken from my own mind. Alan Bennett puts it best. “The best moments in reading are when you come across something - a thought, a feeling, a way of looking at things - which you had thought special and particular to you. And now, here it is, set down by someone else, a person you have never met, someone even who is long dead. And it is as if a hand has come out, and taken yours” - Alan Bennett This feeling is so true. I first felt it strongly when I read these words: “From the moment my eyes rested on the snow-clad alps I worshipped their beauty and was filled with a passionate longing to touch those shining snows, to climb to their heights of silence and solitude, and feel myself one with the mighty forces around me. The great peaks towering into the sky before me touched a chord that all the wonders of my own land had never set vibrating, and filled a blank of whose very existence I had been unconscious.” - Freda Du Faur Freda Du Faur was born in 1882 in Australia and became the first woman in history to climb Aoraki / Mount Cook, the highest Mountain in New Zealand. I have never been to Australia, nor am I from her era, yet, her words, at the time that I read them, were like seeing my own thoughts laid out in front of me. I read her words in the months after I first moved to Canada from Ireland and while I loved the rolling farmland of my original home, the snow-clad mountains, of which Ireland has few to none, that I was now surrounded by in Canada, truly did fill a blank inside me that I had been unconscious about before. Reading the thoughts of others I’ve found has a way of turning an intangible feeling into an idea with form. Here are a few more quotes that I’ve been inspired by and feel will inspire you also. “When we get out of the glass bottles of our ego, and when we escape like squirrels turning in the cages of our personality and get into the forests again, we shall shiver with cold and fright but things will happen to us so that we don’t know ourselves. Cool, unlying life will rush in.” - D.H. Lawrence...
