BY: YACOB BERHANOU
On that queen Saturday, a Saturday which was like a tempting girl, I was there on God’s mountain. Tegan Bennett Daylight, a writer, once said, ‹‹If you scratch a writer, you will get a walker.›› According to a legend, the English poet William Wordsworth covered 300,000 kilometers on foot during his lifetime. The distance he covered would be equivalent to five times the earth’s circumference.
I myself am a wanderer. I have spent the last eighteen years walking an average of 7-10 kilometers a day. Over the course of several years, I had to wake up at least once a week at two after midnight to scrutinize Addis Ababa’s hidden ignominy, misery, hunger, and shame… On that tempting Saturday, I was standing on ‹Yeka terara› (the mountain of God).
The great late poet and Egyptologist, Laureate Tsegaye Gebremedhen, in his frequent interviews with Tobia magazine, said, ‹Ka› is an ancient Kush appellation for God. Eventually, when we say ‹yeka Michael› we mean – Michael of God, Yekakit – February (the 6th month of the Ethiopian calendar) – the complementary truth of God, Yeka terara – the mountain of God.›
On that day, there I was standing on the mountain of God. But I wasn’t alone. I retain a burden of worry; weeping for the victims and feeling heavy hearted for exiles. However, I never expose my tears to anyone; I hold on to the agony deep in my heart. My soul will gradually be shaken by the gentleness of the pure natural territory outstretched before me; touched by its raw, real, scenery, and warmness, and moved by the rustling and clapping of the leaves; I will be released from worldly bewilderment for hours.
Friedrich Nietzsche shares this sentiment. “He who climbs upon the highest mountains laughs at all tragedies, real or imaginary.” Whether they belong to or are named after God, the mountains are our brothers. In the distant past, they served as a refuge from the enemy for our ancestors.
Today, they are at the center of reclaiming our humanistic psyche. Mountains are a symbol of eternity. Again, we also considered them as measures of determination. However, mountains aren’t alone. Trees are their faithful and omniscient companions. Harry J. Stead, a wandering author like me wrote, “Trees are distinctly mysterious to me; they are like gods or mystics, infinitely wiser than humans, all-knowing, all-seeing, and we can only admire them from below.”
Particularly for we Africans, trees are like guardian angels. According to Zimbabwean cultural researcher Pathisa Nyathi, (aside from the Ethiopian Geez alphabet), ‹‹ Africans’ lack of a written language doesn’t mean that Africans never wrote their history, they inscribe their history through dance, stories, fables, myths, norms, lullabies, and experiences.›› In doing so trees were everything for Africans.
They render every turn and twist of our oral history, they accumulate every segment of our collective memory, and they embodied our grandfathers and forefathers’ struggle and triumph… I wonder if Herman Hesse was thinking about Adbar trees (trees consecrated to guardian spirits) scattered all over Africa while writing the following piece of thought;
‹‹Trees have always been for me the most intense preachers. I revere them when they are alive in the forests and groves. And I revere them even more when they stand alone. They are like solitary people. They are like hermits. Who, because of some kind of weakness, left society, but are like great, lonesome people, like Beethoven and Nietzsche… nothing is more sacred, more exemplary than a beautiful, strong tree…. Trees are temples.
Whoever knows how to talk to them will know the truth.›› (The Seasons of the Soul: The Poetic Guidance and Spiritual Wisdom of Herman Hesse) Ever since I was a child, during my every evening walks, I wondered about trees’ forlorn situations. In their reticence, silent, and serene manner, these senile creatures triggered a bit of sympathy in my inner self… Though they say, water holy, for me, there is nothing holier than trees.
Trees are enduring creatures that cherish, offer, contribute, and shelter every sentient being and expect nothing. And yet again, according to Ethiopian Laureate Tsegaye Gebremedhen, when human beings marched out from the depths of ignorance, trees were the earliest and the first to salute, shelter, guard, and feed them. Even today! Later on, as a man sought to find a symbol that would bear his spiritual emblem, he ended up with those sturdy firm trees again. He worshipped them. They became his Adbar (temples).
When I read a study by a Canadian scientist, Suzanne Simard, I was delighted. Trees do communicate. The mighty trees share food, messages, and warnings left and right with the smaller shrubs and seedlings sheltered under their shadow through their roots. It’s true, trees communicate. Our ignorance made us consider them dumb beings. However, trees have recorded far more stories than all of us.
They watched us all in silence. They listened to humankind’s cruel deliberations under their shadow for thousands of years. Below them, they observed fluttering, cowering, and bawling human beings. They are gods and goddesses. The Indian mystic poet Rabindranath Tagore has an awesome poem about trees that can elevate our concept…
Silence my soul, these trees are prayers.
I asked the tree, “Tell me about God”;
Then it blossomed.
Then, why do we seek God only in oblivious buildings of temples and mosques? God is a reality manifested in myriad aspects of nature’s burning, blooming, glowing, paleness … This reality will only be revealed when we are actively involved with nature’s harmony; ready to flirt with each butterfly, play around with each flower in a sincere spirit, dance and sway along with the wind. In the beginning God blessed man as a custodian of nature, later on, he instead turned it into a curse. He becomes a swarm of locusts that cruelly weep out everything on the planet.
Nonetheless, the desire to take refuge in the mountains is not something you do for the sake of leisure and a sabbatical. It is an urge to be with the wild nature; a craving for fresh air. Climbing mountains become a gratifying pursuit. It was a glimpse of returning to the archetype; being moved by a vast and deep light expanse, watching the sun hide behind the horizon like an irascible girl, the desire to feast one’s eye on while darkness oozing out from the depths of valleys and embrace the entire landscape…
Certainly, mountains are our brothers. Yes, I want to be at the top of the mountain to enfold and kiss the clouds; I want to beguile the moon, tittle-tattle the sun, and attend the court of God. I didn’t perceive the trial as a tyrannical rule as the earthlings thought it. The trial held for mercy, not for damnation. Shakespeare must have seen the moon here on God’s mountain when he wrote, “It is the very error of the moon. She comes nearer to earth than she was wont. And, it makes men mad.”
THE ETHIOPIAN HERALD SATURDAY 17 JUNE 2023
