Always be yourself; unless you can be a mountain

Always be yourself; unless you can be a mountain. Then always be a mountain.

On top of the mountain, on the surface that everyone can see, there are trees. These trees sway and bend with the winds but they abide. Some are old and strong, some are young and frail; some wither and die while others in greenness thrive. 

Underneath the trees there is the earth. Few ever notice it, but it’s there. The relentless pouring of the storms ever carves new scars into the soil, eroding away its fertile deposits and baring the tortured roots of the trees. But the earth abides; always assuming a new form

And beneath it all, hidden from the sight of the world, lies that stony core – the mountain’s very heart, crisscrossed with veins of precious ores. Perhaps a cavern of perpetual dark burrows through that heart and tunnels deeply run, where albino things blindly crawl having never known the sun. Yet this stone core solidly stands and so it ever has ‘ere the eons began. 

Men will pass and men will fall; men will fade but the mountains shall remain.