Mt Fuji: The Great White Ghost

A great god of the past, an old stone monolith. Mt. Fuji towers over Tokyo and is magnificent in its timelessness.

 A mountain is a monument; Timeless in the eyes of a mortal, ageless even to the oldest living thing on our planet. These stone gods have towered over us, nearly unchanged for millennia. The ancient Japanese tale of the Bamboo cutter places the name Fuji close to the meaning of “Immortal,” while others still liken it to “without equal” or “never ending,” but all of these reach the same conclusion, all allude to the one thing: these massive construct, monoliths of stone and snow are beyond our understanding, out of our reach. You can climb and plant a flag, “conquer” the mountain, but you cannot comprehend a mountain. It will be there when you pass from this world; it will stand as the winds rip your flags to shreds, as the ground strips the flesh from your bones and grinds your bones to dust.

My limited time in Japan didn’t allow for me to summit Fuji, I was lucky enough to capture these few pictures from the breakneck speed of my Shinkansen bullet train. I have never quite seen a mountain like that old god: One solitary white peak rising above the city, a peak that does not wane in size as you leave. I was in awe of the way it commanded and dominated the horizon, towering over the comparably tiny city below. Tokyo, a metropolis famous the world over was dwarfed, the man made triumph of concrete and steel appeared stunted and disfigured beneath the majestic white peak. It’s hard not to look through the eyes of an ancient when you stare at that mighty peak, and you start to wonder if Fuji is indeed a god. And if it is, what will it think of our tiny and quaint village built in obvious worship around its base? For now though, the great white ghost slumbers, groaning rock shifting as it sleeps,  it remains blissfully unaware in its magnificence,.

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19 Mar This entry was published on March 19, 2013 at 2:08 am. It’s filed under Nature, Symbols and tagged cademartori, digital, endless, frame, frank, fuji, iconic, japan, mountain, mt fuji, nature, outdoors, peak, photo, photography, scenery, scenic, shinkansen, sky, snow, view, white. Bookmark the permalink. Follow any comments here with the RSS feed for this post.