Some people measure a day in Almora by whether the lofty Himalaya will peak through her veil of high altitude powder puff and the resultant powdery dust laden air. “See the Mountains today?” is the opening line of my neighbour after the usual good mornings. A ‘Yes’ or ‘No’ answer will determine the cosmic quality of another day already in paradise.

It’s either a Mountain Day or a No Mountain Day. Actually they are really Mountain Mornings but the memory lasts throughout the day. It’s the nature of a mountain to be busy with clouds and snow and other mysterious stuff in the afternoons but mornings are the twilight zone of the mountains. Sometimes in that space where the earth is still settling into the shape of the day yet to come, they will reveal themselves in startling proximity. How is it that they can be so close and yet so far?

And yet they are always there, it’s only our perception that is altered. I have been thinking a lot about perception and reality and all that cosmic stuff since my mind has been allowed its full play here. Walking past Epworth Estate where Timothy Leary and other luminaries of the psychedelic culture lived may or may not have a bearing on this. As far as I understand, Tim and his gang opened the gateway to the divine experience through the controlled use of Psilocybin. I was still scraping my knees and falling out of trees in those heady days and anyway children have direct access to the Divine so it wasn’t an issue for me then.

What intrigued me more in those days was the idea that people didn’t believe in God. Who else did all this, I would ask my mother gesturing at the sky and the earth and the bits in between. She would shrug and get back to the task of the baby at hand. I would go and lie on the grass and gaze into the endless sky, knowing that if I traveled into that depth, I would reach the furtherest understood expanses of outer space and the blackness of the endless night. Rolling over, I would observe the way ants made each blade of grass move as they marched in some eternal rhythm. In between was me and the world I was born into. I knew in some childish mystical way that I was as much a part of that universe as it was a part of me. I didn’t feel the need the record it or analyse it or (worse) doubt it.

It simply was. It was simply the act of a child recording the fact that it is alive in a mysterious but known universe, something I believe that kids do daily on an organic level. But back to the mountains and our daily perception of them, since they are my meditation focus point at the moment. Yesterday, walking up the hill with my neighbour, he remarked out loud that the mountains were “out”.

We stopped to take in their beauty; I also stopped to get my breath since this hill never seems to get any easier even as it gets shorter. Looking at the mountains sketching themselves in the morning air, with clouds draped to reveal and conceal their beauty, here the full glory of a peak, there merely a hint in the clouds above of the hidden shape. It put me in mind of Katherine Hepburn and something she said in her autobiographical memoir, when she praised the work of another actor.  She said that the actor had ‘merely sketched the elements of the action’ and the audience would understand that the entire act had been preformed. It sounded to me like the Zen of acting.

And here before breakfast that story repeated in the early morning darshan of the Himalaya. The Zen of Mountains, I thought to myself. My neighbour being younger and less susceptible to flights of fancy before breakfast turned with a dismissive air and said, “Not very bloody clear is it?” and marched on up the hill.

Dianne Sharma-Winter is a freelance writer living between India and New Zealand. She writes on travel, culture and humour using India as her muse.