Liza Field

Liza Field's column appears twice a month in Extra.

Recent columns

• Recalling the start of a movement on the retail front lines
• Don't lose sight of the unseen 'big picture'
• Remember: There's more to life than what we see

Our mountains can really move.

Their rock base, over time, dissolves slowly into lichen, wintergreen, sassafras and sourwood. It can become glowworms, then float up as starry, entrancing fireflies. It can move from manure to milkweed, from butterfly to Mexico, summer songbird to Brazilian winter.

Is this not weird? Once sheer rock face, high and steep as the Himalayas, the stone of our Appalachian chain has been eroding, through millions of years, particle by particle, from hard impenetrability into a slump-shouldered fostering of life -- flowing, vulnerable, impermanent.

There's so much wisdom in this action, we could attend Mountain University for years, just sitting on a bluff and absorbing more useful instruction than any human lecture could offer.

After all, we're kin to the mountains, not just because we wear the same original stardust, or because we drink their minerals and breathe from their trees and eat from their soil.

But our spirits, as well, dressed in stone-that-has-died, relate strongly to mountains. Maybe it's one reason spiritual seekers through the ages, from China to India, from the Middle East to the Americas, have been drawn to climb mountains, where the lonely crags and windy solitudes help a person hear that "still, small voice."

Mountains also offer a template for how to live. Take my old friend, Sand Mountain, south of Wytheville.

When Western Virginia Land Trust was working to protect this acreage, one local skeptic commented, "That place? It's nothing but an old rockpile."

This was true. You can see some of these high rock outcroppings from the town below, the setting sun gleaming brightly off their smooth slabs. If you climb along the ridge, you'll go from boulder to boulder, like vertebrae along the spine-bone of a giant.

But much of the mountain's ancient sandstone has eroded, like all of our Appalachians, and made this old rockpile an ark full of wildlife. As I've wandered here, over time, I've realized what allows warblers, galax, owls, oaks, woodpeckers and skinks to live here. The old rock mountain is being eaten alive.

You can get a whiff of this same ongoing communion each summer on Tinker, Catawba, North, Table, Flat Top, White Top, Iron, Pine, or any other local mountain. You might first smell the cold creek cracking through stone, pumping up the mineral air of a place hospitable to crawdads and dragonflies.

Then, respirations of old leafmeal, dank rhododendron hollows, incense-laden pine straw, astringent sap and sharp-odored sand, warmed by spotlights of sun, all twitch around your face like steam from an exotic teabag, steeped in June humidity. This is the tactile experience of a rock giving itself up for life.

If you'd rather get your tactile experiences from the beach, packing your folding chairs up this very morning, be assured the mountains have already gone there ahead of you by so many ages, they are the beach. Grain by grain, eroding downstream into rivers, our mountains have become dunes and sea oats, gulls and sandpipers.

Here we find similar wisdom. Our barrier islands and beaches exist because the old Appalachian rock let them go -- dying to its old nature and allowing life to flow. Had our many river dams existed from prehistoric times, impeding this flow and piling up sand, our coastline would look very different.

Retired University of Georgia law professor and conservationist Milner S. Ball has pointed out that it's the nature of our Outer Banks and barrier islands themselves to flow, not coagulate into permanence.

Sea tides and weather shift these islands. So the beachfront "owner" with a half-acre stretched, today, between his insured, "permanent" mega-home and the tide may find no acreage at all next year -- and no house -- while a beach resident southward finds he owns an extra lot-ful of sand, peppercorned with busted roofing, planks and chunks of asphalt.

Maybe, as Ball suggests, it therefore isn't appropriate to take our Western concepts of rigid boundaries, ownership and permanence and superimpose them onto land whose nature is to flow.

But even our mountains flow. The air and water, sunlight and seasons and weather, cycles of rot and bloom -- all are flowing by nature. It's called "life," to which security, rigidity and permanence are unnatural.

We rarely hear this ancient lesson today, though it lives in our bloodstreams. We learn, rather, that we must be secure at all costs, preserve ourselves, never give ground or lose, be used or age; that even at death we should be preserved with chemicals, in containers that cannot rot.

This weird illusion of permanence infuses much of our economy, politics, education, and even some religions. Yet we wonder why Americans feel depressed, cluttered, heavy, stressed and half-petrified.

The old sages, like our mountains, had a solution. We'll pick up that flow next time.