What is it about a mountain, a lump of rock, that so integrates itself into out soul?

I wonder this sometimes, as I stare and lose myself in the depths of scale. A mountain is, essentially, simply rock and earth that’s been forced upward. It’s not, in one sense, any different from the rest of the land we live on.

Yet at the same time, it’s something so critically different from, and separate from, its surroundings. Much like, I guess, we are. We’re indvidual creatures, and separate from everything that is not ourselves, yet we’re also the very same organic material that make up virtually every other living creature. The molecules and atoms that make up my body are the very same molecules and atoms that once made up a tree, or a blade of grass, or a fish, or an egg, or a dinosaur. Yet right now, they’re part of this thing I call ‘me’.

I wonder if mountains wonder about us as much as we wonder about them?

Aerial photo of Mt. Blackburn, in Wrangell-St. Elias National Park and Preserve, Alaska.