Living
With Gentle Visions,
Prophetic
Images, Divine Dreams
Ivan A.
Il’in
The Mountains in
Dombay, Russia
When I see
snow-covered mountains rising up in the distance toward the clouds, my heart
trembles with unexpected joy. Ancient and silenced memories awaken within me,
as if I had already contemplated these images at some time past, and thus have
always longed for them, as if the most wonderful and sacred promises were being
fulfilled.
I stand awed and overwhelmed, and do not know if I
should believe this sight, so light, so bold is this sweep to the skies. How
gentle, how illusory are the outlines. And how powerful are the masses of earth
hidden within them. I see the earth rising up toward the heavens, I see the
heavens embracing it, I see how the earth becomes lost in the heavens as they
merge together - can it be that the earth itself becomes part of the heavens?
Is this not a dream? Or is perhaps this vision a true reality, while the flat
existence of every day is merely a weighty dream?
Where did this blessed trepidation come from, this
feeling of approaching my native land? It is as if this splendor shining down
from afar, this promised future, has emerged from my intimate past, from my
existence before the creation of time …. Is my soul perhaps so “ancient of
days” that I truly was present at the forming of the worlds? Or do these
distant mountains perhaps recount to me what I was, what I am, what I will be -
what splendor awaits me in the future?
Gentle visions, prophetic images, divine dreams …. But
now the sight has vanished. The airy specters have been veiled by earthly mist
and heavenly clouds. Only the heart whispers to me of the possible existence of
the impossible.
Later, the mountains allow me to come among them: they
draw me up, calmly and serenely letting me tread upon them and scale their
steep peaks. Their calmness is passed on to me, and I climb ever higher. My
ascent is slow; I must not and should not hurry, for much time is needed to
overcome the high altitude, to become accustomed to it so that my head stops
spinning from this sleepy mountain rebellion, so that my breathing does not
stop from this prayer of nature…
I am already tired, but I do not want to and cannot
think about my fatigue. A mysterious power calls me to the top. I am suddenly
bent on going higher, higher, ever higher, as if a mighty and precipitate heave
upward has taken hold of me and I am powerless to resist. Only after having
exhausted all my efforts would it be possible to stop climbing and break away,
but even then I would feel in my soul that I had fallen disgracefully short in
a great deed. No, that would be impossible; I must keep going to the end, in
order to experience the meaning and destiny of that ancient uprising for
myself, to learn the restless prayer of the mountains…
000
Published in the
associated websites on 24 March 2020. Reproduced from the book “The Singing
Heart”, by Ivan Ilyin (or Ivan A. Il’in), Orthodox Christian Translation Society,
OCTS, USA, 2016, 190 pp., see pp. 108-109.
The three initial paragraphs are also published at the May 2017 edition
of “The Aquarian Theosophist”, page
09.
000