The mountain is me: A Pragmatic Humanist Philosophy for a Complex Century (coming soon)

The mountain was not a place I chose. It was the place that chose me. Two lonely houses, shared with our neighbors, on the top of a ridge surrounded by forest and wildness. A Volga river in the view. The nearest village some kilometers away. The road leading to that house was wild. It was easily destroyed during floods, and sometimes it was impossible to leave for weeks.

 

I remember laying bricks. One by one, with handmade cement mixed by my grandfather's hands. The house we built became the house that built me.

The garden where we harvested taught me a thing I would only understand years later: that patience is not waiting—it is the act of turning the soil anyway, knowing the harvest may fail but doing it still. That is where my obsession with gardening began.

The mountain was a quiet classroom.

 

To keep myself entertained, my grandfather taught me how to kill a mole. I sat next to the holes for hours, waiting. To my own surprise, I never caught one. The lesson was not in the killing; the lesson was in the breathing.

 

The mountain was a threat. Snakes everywhere—fuck, every time you stepped somewhere you had to check. It took me years to find peace with snakes. Not because I learned to love them, but because I learned they were never the danger I feared. The danger was the fear itself. And the grasshoppers, huge and dying at summer's end, crunching underfoot. Some things you cannot avoid. You just walk anyway.

 

The mountain also led me to discoveries I would never have made anywhere else. I realized that our fields were filled with hemp, and that sparked a different kind of creativity in me. I began making Green Dragon by hand—a potent drink infused with hemp and alcohol. My grandfather watched my experiments with quiet amusement, but he also reminded me of something important: creativity is a gift, yet not every expression of it is meant for good.

 

The mountain also taught me that happiness grows when it is shared. The best days were the weekends when the boy from the neighboring house came to visit. The moment he arrived, my heart seemed to smile. My soul no longer noticed the loneliness that had surrounded me for so long. Instead, it was filled with warmth, connection, and the quiet comfort of companionship.

 

The mountain taught me how not to lose hope. We lived without water for many years. We searched for underground sources that could be pumped, and spent a full year digging a deep hole, only to find nothing. I remember my grandfather’s sadness, and how deeply it affected him.

 

The following year, while walking in the forest to gather wild mushrooms, he found a pond. It was a moment of quiet triumph, only one kilometer away. What I learned from this was not only the joy of finally finding water, but how to value every step of the journey—even the difficult ones—and to keep searching for what gives life meaning, even when the outcome is uncertain.

 

 

The mountain told me how to be brave when you can smell the burning smoke. Sometimes there were wildfires. My grandfather and I would go out with shovels to battle the flames.

 

The mountain was also a simple joy in this uneasy existence. I learned how to make a handmade fly killer from an abandoned rubber tractor wheel I found and young trees. I had a big collection of those fly killers. My grandfather taught me how to ride a bike. I rode across the fields.

 

I remember once having dinner with my grandparents when they started talking about how they were getting old. Someday they would die, and I would need to carry on. The shock and refusal stayed in my head and heart that day. I felt so much unacceptance. Who knew? They are all dead now, and somehow I still carry on. The mountain taught me that love stays in the heart forever.

 

The mountain taught me that humans are the most dangerous animals I have ever seen. And also the most tender.

One of the saddest and most common things I notice in humans is fear of people. How interesting that we are so scared of ourselves.

 

I was raised by different hands. Sometimes on the streets. Sometimes by different families, extended family members. Being a social orphan, I met a lot of people on my path. I saw them good. I saw them bad. I know isolation like a language. I know survival like a reflex.

 

My therapists called me strong. But it never felt like strength. It felt like being guarded. Like something invisible stayed with me—not a guardian angel in the old sense, but a presence made of decisions I did not remember making, and a stubborn refusal to stop moving.

 

From an early age, I had an extreme sense of values. I often doubted whether I could truly bring them through the darkness.

Pragmatic humanism is not a doctrine I found in a book. It is the name I gave to the stance I learned on that mountain.

The mountain is me not because I conquered it, but because I let it shape me. I carry its snakes and its grasshoppers, its wild road and its handmade walls. I carry the fire we fought with shovels and the moles I never caught.

its silence, its failures and its small discoveries. I carry the fear of people—and the stubborn refusal to let that fear win.

 

The mountain is me. And the mountain keeps walking.

 

And you? Can you afford to be vulnerable?

What do you fear? What do you feel?