Above: Climber Christina Ntrougia is on Direkte Ostwand (East wall direct) on the Deltasporn tower; Photo Credit: Lappas Peter

In Greece, Christian Monks lived in caves and wooden perches on precipitous cliffs to be isolated from the world and be closer to God. It was their Meteora. 

History records and legends recall how people have gone to the mountains to escape their demons and to understand who they were. Everybody runs from somewhere sometimes in their lives - the mountains just make you look brave doing it. 
 
That alpine glow does have a way of softening your view and opening your mind to intelligent design. I have always been a spiritual person, yes even spent time in religious life, not quite a hermit’s cave but poverty, chastity and obedience is three shades of foreign to most Western people. I do understand calling. ​

​The Mountains have an ethereal draw for climbers just as it did for the monks. Maybe it’s the silence, maybe it’s the mystery, maybe I’m just a hopeless sentimental with a touch of the crazy? Don’t answer that.

Mountains often attract these types, I concede that’s why I enjoy climbing and climbers. Climbers talk small and live hard, on the edge of their work desk, pulling down in the gym, balancing essays and paying the rent, managing their marriage and their lover - some cliff somewhere, hands plunging deep. Getting buried deep in the mountains l-o-v-e. 
 
A climber’s dream of steep country is hard to pat down; by Friday their climbing heart is a jack in the box.  At drinks after work or lectures,  conversation ping-pongs around that climber, whilst the climber hears them, he or she is not listening, The climber’s mind is coordinating beta and visualizing the moves that the weekend’s project will ask of him or her. The mountains are calling and it’s a siren they cannot silence - even with duff-duff music. 
 
Who knows why folks seek serenity and spirituality in high places?

Photo Credit: Cristos Batalogiannis

Crags are full of prickly stuff, things that bite and sting. Mountains temperature can be freezing cold, sunlit cliffs roast you like a pig on a spit. High places don’t suffer fools, they look down on those who disrespect them. The heights are unforgiving to the lazy and annoying to the impatient. Alpine routes swallow climbers whole. I feel like I am standing on the skin of something living when I walk upon a glacier.  Even so, rope at hand, still the climbers come. 
 
Come crag or come mountain, each hand hunts for a hold and the chalk bag is their thinking place.

Whilst looking out for danger a climber is looking in for courage. Climbing is a dance amongst these two. The sun and the moon are our spectators, A Climber does not diverge from the steps of his or her partner as he or she listens to the ice crunch beneath their boots. Who knows what lurks below? It’s a precise dance and the steps must be followed. 

Like a monk you become reflective, the curse of belaying I suppose? Climbing is not always in the doing. It’s also in the being. Like when you stop and listen to those cliff-top breezes and shiver when they flow right through you refreshing the soul. Whilst I’m shouting out, “Take me!” To my partner up high I am also asking the the Mountain to take me whole and to have it’s way with me. 
 
Each pitch we climb, each campsite we reach, come crag, come mountain, I surrender to my nothingness up there; I let go of my normal and hold fast to the rope which is far more simple than complex society that many perceive as safe in comparison to climbing. My littleness, the electricity of my mountain moment, makes me present.

Photo by Christos Batalogiannis Climbers Christos Tzioufetas- Telis Giannis. Photo Credit: Christos Batalogiannis

Climbers above Meteora Township on Sourloti Tower. Photo Credit: George Voutyropoulos

​When the Meteora Monks sing their prayer as a community there comes a moment when earthly prayer lessons and enlightenment enters. When climbing stops being like a movement it becomes a flow and I am awake to all that it brings.  It’s a raw experience, like taking your clothes off, throwing those to the sand  and running into the water, naked. Well, not quite naked, but the climb strips me of my bullshit and washes me in sweat. The cleansing from which refreshes my spirit. When the wind hits that sweat I receive a cool slap like the earth itself is licking me all over. It clarifies my place,  I am fully conscious.
 
Mountains do all this. High places connect us unlike Facebook ever could. Go to the mountains, dance on a summit, share time with a friend, trust in skills other than your own. Climb large be small and there on that rock buttress, sticking that  heinous move on that abstract boulder, or cutting fresh steps on that weather beaten ridge, your deliverance will be. 

Photo Credit: Cristos Batalogiannis

Climbing is spiritual warfare. A climber anticipates the coming of fear, like a runner the starting gun. Climbers face risk often with only discipline as their ballast. It’s moments of extremes. When we see dark clouds gather, when the body creaks and can take no more, when the moves don’t connect. Sing low. Failure can lead you to prayer and to despair but, like the weather, climbing can turn on a dime. Success is when the climber dances inside his or her own skin and shouts at the sky when the pitch ends or the axe is planted in summit snow. Sing high.
 
Maybe that is what the monks of Meteora were harvesting in those high monasteries? Offering their lives reaching out to the higher glory. In the seeking they overlooked the prize. They did not have to be high on a cliff to reach their spirit. The cliff itself had delivered it to them in spades. They found peace up there not by escaping who was below it was to be in proximity to their deity up there in the heavens. The calm they found, the essence of high places, had found them there on their monastic edge. ​

​Climbing is the action, the mountains are the Church and the communion is the relationship they form with each other. The energy that comes from that, that siren that disrupts us is the mountains calling out to our wild heart, calling us to our mountain home, back to where we are meant to be. The Mountains provides a rich climber a place to be humbled and the poor climber a place to find his or her greatness. 
 
The mountains rise and cast a shadow on all who are below. It’s only by climbing through the shadowed valley that you can rise to the sunlit ridge and see how great it is to live in the light with a beating heart and to drink cool water.

That’s what the monks found up there. Find the monk in you and be thankful for each time you reach up high, suspended for a moment between earth and heaven itself. Take in the grace of a 360 degree summit. Laugh with youthful vigor at the feats of each other as you welcome your partner to the refuge of your temporary belay and the glory that accompanies such action. You may even find yourself in some higher place beyond even there, a Meteora between friends that will always have a place in each other’s memory. Such is reason why we climb mountains. They are more than "just there." We have access to a higher ground and they are calling. 

Vassili Theordorou celebrates at the top. Photo Credit: Marcin Zabinski

 The Greek meaning for Meteora, “suspended in air'.