![\"\"](\"http:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/toulouse\/files\/2012\/02\/P10009681.jpg\")
<\/a><\/p>\nI remember thinking three things as I clung to the scraggly bushes on a mountain in the High Pyrenees:
\n1. Where did the path go?
\n2. Goodness that\u2019s a lot of mud.
\n3. One does not simply walk into Mordor\u2014approach with caution.
\nOf course, there was also the persistent concern that I would fall into the yawning abyss just a few inches away from my ragged sneakers. Being on a mountain in this situation does not give you a lot of options (namely, up or down), so I kept climbing. And, like Stevie Nicks, I turned around. Somehow, between the rock formation that looked suspiciously like Pride Rock from The Lion King and my new location, I found myself suddenly aware of how Edmund Hillary must have felt when he finally got to the top of Mount Everest: amazed by the view and at the fact that I was still alive. And yet, to be honest, the beauty of the view far outweighed my appreciation for my continued existence.
\nI\u2019m not a city girl by any means, but being in the Pyrenees last weekend had an incredible effect on me. Maybe it was breathing all of that fresh air. Or learning about a completely different way of life. Or playing charades by a roaring fire. Or, possibly, getting to pet a sheep and hear a rooster sing in French. The list goes on for quite a while. Yet standing on top of that mountain symbolized all of those other experiences into one Zen moment of complete wonder.
\nI like to think that someday, I\u2019ll go back to the mountains and make enough cheese, garbure, and apple-based pastry to feed an entire village. If anyone knows where I can get a good price for a couple of sheep and maybe a rooster or two, let me know.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
by Christina Socci The Zen of Mountain Climbing \u201cIt is not the mountain we conquer, but ourselves\u201d Edmund Hillary \u201cTruly it may be said that the outside of a mountain is good for the inside of a man\u201d George Edward Wherry, Alpinist I remember thinking three things as I clung to the scraggly bushes on […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4845,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":"","_links_to":"","_links_to_target":""},"categories":[30101],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1570","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-2-la-une-in-english"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/toulouse\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1570","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/toulouse\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/toulouse\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/toulouse\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/4845"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/toulouse\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1570"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/toulouse\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1570\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/toulouse\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1570"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/toulouse\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1570"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/toulouse\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1570"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}