Under the Influence - living with mountains

If you've ever lived in the thrall of something vast and unman-made, like a mountain, or a sea ... you'll relate to my experience of the mountain as a presence over-riding everything else - always there, and always part of a dynamic cycle.
It's the constant back-drop whether looming over the faded red canvas umbrellas and the mud as I'm buying veges at the market, at the end of every cobbled-stoned laneway (or so it seems), and when I emerge from the old town into the new, it's behind all the white-tiled buildings making them seem even shoddier. It's out the window of all my third floor class-rooms at the uni, where, on those Beijing-time winter mornings it can move through black to apricot to pink to white, and even a little green, in the space of an hour.

Yet there's a counter-point to this sense of distance, space and season. I live in a cloistered, cobble-stone and mudbrick maze packed full of narrow, windey walled lanes, much of which (when you escape from the tourist enclave) remains as it has done for the last 800 years.

On days when I don't teach, and weekends when I'm not out trekking, I seldom leave gucheng (old town). Sometimes I imagine an aireal view of myself mindlessly tracing my well-worn routes to and from all my necessary destinations - everything I need for my daily life can be had there within a 4 kilometre radius.