What I Like Second Best About Mongolia
There are many wonderful things about Mongolia, for example the music and the Cream of Wheat and the kindhearted people. I am particularly taken with the landscape. There is something thrilling about the vast steppe, basking like an ocean of green wax that was beat to soft peaks and then left to cool. You can go marching off into that landscape and it swallows you until you are forgotten. And all of the things that you hold in your awareness that might have come to identify you are just memories and they melt away into the gentle expanse until you are left undefined, like the number e.
You turn to face the simplicity of rolling felt carpet and all the entropy in your mind spills out like wild horses. Out to find the limits of the plain. But it is like one of those infinite 2-dimensional plains you find in E&M problems where the x and y axes continue even after you stop looking, and the untamed equines race madly along and away from you. And so the 2nd law of thermodynamics brings you into equilibrium with the stillness.
And then your awareness outruns the horses to the farthest coordinate pair and falls off the framework of Euclidean space. You feel the smallness of your intellect as it flickers on and off, a digital impulse cut from the continuum of your unrealized analog idea. You are at once a fleeting detail and a vague permanence.
Exhausted you will fold like collapsible lawn furniture into the shape of prayer. And the Eternal Blue Sky will pat you atop your head and remind you that you’d better turn around if you’re going to make it back in time for supper.
©2008 Hillary Swanson. All rights reserved.