Hunger Mountain: A Field Guide to Mind and Landscape
by David Hinton
(Shambhala, November 2012)
David Hinton is one of my favorite translators of Chinese poetry. I’ve enjoyed many of his works, of which Mountain Home stands out and might be my favorite. I was excited when I received his own Hunger Mountain, his account of a series of walks up and down a mountain near his Vermont home.
As David walks, he also weaves a human consciousness into his natural environment exploring the texture of his own experience. Transcendental moments open windows into ourselves. For us his reader, we can use his walk to explore our own internal culture. While walking with David, we address the textures and fundamentals of our own everyday experiences. Through his wisdom we begin to truly see more of who we are and better understand our cultural landscape.
The lessons (or chapters) are focused on real life issues. Chapter one “Sincerity” sets the tone of this transforming essay collection. We want to see our lives as clearly as possible, and David uses his many years of understanding the great Chinese masters to adapt nature as poetry as he translates his musings.
Hunger Mountain offers us a spiritual ecology of walking, using natural happenings to express how things arise and pass away, how our observances reappear transformed into other generating forms. Hunger Mountain is a walking meditation where we watch the process of forming our thoughts, as they come and go, moving us deeper into who we are.
I consider my experience reading Hunger as a personally transforming prose poem itself. For me, it is a book length poem, a meditation to help the reader find out more about their truest self. To read poetry this way is how I learned to enjoy reading poems. Using the hidden, the unsaid, to fill in the gaps helps me address dormant emotions. That is the diamond of joy that a real reading experience can bring.
If you want to explore you inner ecology, treat yourself to the pleasure of transforming yourself on Hunger Mountain.
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A mountain can be a great teacher–not only because it manifests the cosmology of sincerity and restless hunger with such immediacy and drama, but also because it stands apart, at once elusive and magisterial. Walking up Hunger Mountain today, its imposing and indifferent presence reminds me yet again that things in and of themselves remain beyond us, even after the most exhaustive and accurate scientific or philosophical account , the most compelling mythology, or the most concise and penetrating poem.
-David Hinton
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