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Europe's most active volcano, Sicily's Mt. Etna, is erupting again.

Today, therefore, let me tell you a story of a previous eruption: a true story, a story profoundly pagan.

It took place during the 1980s.

The old woman had lived in the house on the slopes of Mt. Etna all her life. She had been born in the house; there she was married, there she bore her children and, after her husband's death, raised them herself.

Now the lava was coming.

Her son had driven up from Palermo to take her to safety. The car was fully loaded. Now she stands alone in the kitchen, for what might well be the last time.

She opens a bottle of wine, wine that she made herself from grapes raised and pressed on the volcano's fertile slopes. She pours two glasses.

She salutes the mountain with which she has lived in relationship all her life. She drinks a final toast.

Then she leaves, perhaps never to return.

On the kitchen table behind her stand two glasses: one empty, one full.

Do mountains have rights?

As a pagan, I believe that they do.

The ancestors, in their wisdom, understood that some places must simply be “set aside.” This is the price that we must expect to pay for the permission to “use” other places: that some should be left to themselves.

Surely the highest mountain in the world merits such respect.

In indigenous lore, the peak of Chomolungma—the Mountain Mother of the World—was preeminently one such place: the residence of a goddess, sacrosanct, in her sanctity forbidden to humanity.

For 65 years now, she has instead been polluted with the excrement (tons of it!), garbage, and even the frozen corpses, of climbers.

If hubris has a tag line, “conquering 'Everest'” must be it. No one has ever conquered, or ever will conquer, the Mountain Mother of the World. Rather, in her ruth (mercy), she has permitted those who profane her to depart alive.

Increasingly, now, she withholds her ruth. Should anyone be surprised?

The rain poured down without cease, a thorough, all-embracing sound. I was ensconced in the shelter of a tarp I’d slung between two trees, its sides open above the leafy softness of the forest floor. My comfy sleeping bag lay over a ground sheet. I had about six by three feet of space in which to stay dry for a long wet day, spent on the side of a mountain in Vermont. I slept, I mused, I wrote. It was heaven.

They say that there are many paths to the top of the mountain.

Maybe so.

But in my experience, different paths lead to different places.

Some paths lead to the valley. Some paths lead to the sea.

Yes, some paths do lead to the top of the mountain.

But, of course, there are many mountains.