on the mountain top

The weather and wildness of hostile environments
Was where he found his home,
Like Ray Mears, he sought to live beneath
The open skies, a quiet, austere life
Amongst majestic mountains
With fountains of knife-rocked tips
Forever attempting to slit the new sky in two.

But even the wanderer gets lonesome sometimes
And eventually we find, a home is not a home
When we live there alone.
And the top of a mountain
Can seem an inhospitable place
With wind battered rocks scattered
Across it's awesome, snow-struck face.

We respect it, fear it,
Feel it's supremacy within,
Yet something drives us to conquer this,
To scale it, race it,
With a single aim in mind -
To absorb it's earthly power beneath
Our human feet.
To resist the urge to retreat,
To stand, all-seeing at it's summit,
To be above it -
This world, these clouds
And all our mortal doubts.

It's a con of course,
We must never presume to know anything at all,
Least of all, that we are ever
Exempt from nature's cruel, indelible force.