In recent years, I have heard many times that the confinement that we have lived around me, and the anguish that this has caused, has taught us to value everything around us.

That is how it has been, we have opened the doors and we have all troped out to the street, to the mountain, to do sport on the roads. The topics I do not like very much, but it is clear that the hustle and bustle that has brought the isolation has left a party of reflection, and among those that I have read I would like to highlight the chronicle “Purple Totem” of journalist Ainhoa Lendinez. It was a cool, light chronicle, shameful, first-person, close to one that remains in memory. I don’t know if I’m wrong, but I felt ‘harrimina’ in his words, what I have felt like climbing in the lockdown, and somehow Lendínez’s reflection led me to the first steps I took in climbing.

In line with what was written by the Guipuzkoan climber, I wondered what has pushed climbers to stick their legs on the ground to the wall and scale up the reschices that until now were inaccessible at home: balconies, kitchen cabinets, children's shelves, etc.

Want to distinguish yourself from the rest of sports, seek a denied gift from birth or enjoy the gift that is natural? Looking for treasures stolen by nature or sharing them with the people we love? Gaining space in the world of the elderly, being an adventure storyteller, dreaming of granite dreams, or remembering lost friends along the way? Number of heads, various opinions; the list of reasons for climbing is endless, such as mountains.

Life has taught us that in the mountains, in stone coliseums created over time, great monologues and conversations can appear under the blue sky covered with stars. Paine, Lavaredo, Trango, Jorasses, Dru, Tsaranoro, Yosemite, Urriellu, Monrebei, Fitch Roy… witness thousands of stories, of course. However, reading the chronicle of Lendínez, I remembered that it is not necessary to travel to the corners of the postcards or books to collect exciting experiences in our logbook, because there are in the magical environment excellent possibilities that can serve us as a climber: Atxarte, Balerdi, Egino, Ziordia, Aiztondo, Txindoki, Ogoño, Ranero, etc.

If we asked our co-workers, or our climbing ancestors (Rebuffat, Bonatti, Cassin, Terray…) for the sense of climbing, perhaps some would decorate their answers as if they were poems. Of course I can also be romantic and pretend to be Lord Byron, because those of us walking down the mountain can easily dream of a perfect climbing, full of bucolism.

In any case, I believe that this issue is much more prosaic, simpler, easier. It is a good and beautiful option to understand climbing as poetry and to see the stone, as a poem, with the eyes of a poet, in the way of Gabriel Aresti. However, we cannot forget that we have to grasp that poem with our hands and feet, because if not, those poetic images would be carried by the wind, and we, in carelessness, would fall from our stone altar.

So remember it, dear poet! If you've just fallen down climbing through the contemplation of the landscape and you're not dead by making a selfie, do as Ainhoa Lendínez did, break the knuckles, put the magnesium in your hands and take the poem in front of you firmly.