Uncovering the Path

I pack a small backpack: water, fruit and nut trail mix, binoculars, a birding book, a notebook and pen, rain coat, pocket knife, a slim book--maybe John Muir, or Wordsworth, or Thomas Merton, or Gary Snyder's "Turtle Island."

I think about the movie "Empire Strikes Back," where Luke Skywalker looks into the cave that is his test and asks, "What's in there?" And Yoda's response, "Only what you take with you." Be light and free. Be open. I start up the mountain with Muir in my head:

Climb the mountains and get their good tidings. Nature's peace will flow into you as sunshine flows into trees. The winds will blow their own freshness into you, and the storms their energy, while cares will drop away from you like the leaves of Autumn. - John Muir

Hold on, who said that, Muir or Yoda? Maybe Muir is the Yoda of the mountains.

For 20 years or more, I have used, lived, and contemplated the metaphor of life, and the life of the spirit/soul, being a journey up the mountain. I think that too many of us--speaking for myself--wear a path back and forth or around the base of the mountain and think (or tell ourselves) we are making progress upwards; that we are getting somewhere.

And that's where Yoda comes in, we find only what we take with us. And what we take with us are our habits, our worries, our fears, our doubt, and in some cases our stuff--our material things. And those things either weigh us down so heavily that we can't climb, or we have to wrestle with them before we get anywhere.

This past Sunday, at church our pastor put Henri Nouwen's "The Spiritual Life," in my hands, a tome of eight of his books brought into one. We were talking favorite spiritual writers while on a mulching expedition during the week and he couldn't recall Nouwen's name as we threw around Merton, Bonhoeffer, and Buechner.

"This is for you," he said, with his best Yoda smile. What he had first mentioned about Nouwen was that he walked away from prestigious academic positions to focus on helping men and women with intellectual disabilities. I've been spending my morning coffee with Nouwen this week. Books and writers have a tendency to find me at the right time.

This may not be the most indicative picture of Nouwen, but come on, he's on a skateboard :)

Nouwen talks about how our time and schedules are filled, how we are always busy, because being busy is a status symbol--look at how busy and productive I am--nd yet our spirit is unfulfilled because we are not filling our lives or schedules with the right things.

Only having the girls half the time, I spend a lot of time alone. That can be both good and bad for an overthinker. The only times I can really turn my brain off, or allow my thoughts to slough off are when I am running or in prayer/meditation, which can be sitting with coffee, watching the sunrise or sunset, staring at the stars, but it has to be intentional time.

For all my alone time over the past couple years, when I looked closely, I found myself circling the bottom of the mountain; pacing back and forth in a rut of my own footprints. My habits, my lack of clarity, my inertia, nothing was helping me push up. And yet, climbing the spiritual mountain, carpe'ing the diem, asking the big questions and looking for answers, and being on the move rather than one place--these are all things that make me, me.

My time alone somehow wasn't solitude, or at least not enough of it.

Once the solitude of time and space have become a solitude of the heart, we will never have to leave that solitude. We will be able to live the spiritual life in any place and at any time. Thus the discipline of solitude enables us to live active lives in the world, while remaining always in the presence of the living God. - Henri Nouwen

There are times when it feels like you've just unloaded rocks out of your pockets or backpack and feel lighter and ready to climb.

I have much more to say about the mountain--maps, compasses, the virtue of discerning your true path vs. switching paths at every pass, the people you meet along the way, whose paths overlap with yours and who you walk with for a time--but let's call this part one. Beginning again. Or uncovering a path I had let get overgrown.

As I swill some water, smile at the sunrise, and keep on up the mountain, I look into Wordsworth's lines that are among the favorite I have ever read:

...And I have felt
A presence that disturbs me with the joy
Of elevated thoughts; a sense sublime
Of something far more deeply interfused,
Whose dwelling is the light of the setting suns,
And the round ocean, and the living air,
And the blue sky, and in the mind of man,
A motion and a spirit, that impels
All thinking things, all objects of thought,
And rolls through all things. I heretofore am I still
A lover of the meadows and the woods,
And mountains, and of all that we behold
From this green earth; of all the mighty world
Of eye and ear, both what they half-create,
And what perceive; well pleased to recognize
In nature and in the language of the sense,
The anchor of my purest thoughts, the muse,
The guide, the guardian of my heart, and soul
Of all my mortal being.
- William Wordsworth, from Lines Written a Few Miles Above Tintern Abbey

Step Away from the Fridge

I've never shot my refrigerator with a .357 magnum. Or any other caliber revolver for that matter. But I think we've all reached the level of frustration in life that Henry Lightcap/Edward Abbey outlines to begin "The Fool's Progress," (I love that the NY Times review is titled, "Beer, Guns, and Neitzsche") his autobiographical novel. The hope is that we don't get to the refrigerator-shooting point in our lives, or, that having been there, we know how to avoid finding ourselves there again.

We've got a habit we try to keep of around the dinner table, before we eat, saying some of the things we are thankful for in our lives. Not just at Thanksgiving, but any night we sit around the dining table (which isn't every night). For me it can be that I'm thankful for a great day; I'm thankful for a roof over my head and food on the table; I'm thankful for the girls' being healthy and making honor roll; I'm thankful to have a job where I look forward to going to work every day; I'm thankful to be outside in cool, fall weather that reminds me I am alive.

I'm thankful for books, movies, art, that transports my mind and opens my soul to the Universe. I'm thankful to be reading at present a couple heroes of mine in John Muir and Edward Abbey. Heroes not just in what they thought or wrote, but of living their lives outdoors, on their own terms, even if/when those terms weren't shared by others.

I recently watched "Into the Wild," the film version of the John Krakauer's telling of the life and story of Chris McCandless. It's freeing to see Alexander Supertramp slough off the conventions of modern life and live his life his way. But I got to the end and felt, no, where McCandless went wrong, someone like Muir had a handle on it. I'm an introvert, but not a hermit or a recluse. Life, love, adventures are meant to be shared. And Muir found something, being out in Nature, that he felt so passionate about that he had to communicate it to others. Muir wandered the country on his own terms more than McCandless, but still found ways to connect and make sense of it all without having to die alone in his 20s. This is not a knock on McCandless, per se, it's just seeing other paths to live life on my own terms, with deep meaning and connections to Nature, people, place, community.

"Into the Wild," sent me back to my bookshelves for Muir and Abbey; for Gary Snyder, and also for David Abram. And this is where the me that was going to be a philosophy professor loops back onto the scene. Abram's book, "The Spell of the Sensuous" has been calling me for a challenge for some time. Over the course of trail and ultra running, I came across Abram and the concept of ecophenomenology. Phenomenology (what I was going to get my PhD studying) sets itself the task of looking at how we find and make meaning in the world. If you add "eco" to that, you get the idea. It's a way of combining the natural world and our experience of it, and the value of being out in it, with philosophy. From Abram

As technological civilization diminishes the biotic diversity of the earth, language itself is diminished. As there are fewer songbirds in the air, due to the destruction of their forests and wetlands, human speech loses more and more of its evocative power. For when we no longer hear the voices of warbler and wren, our own speaking can no longer be nourished by their cadences. As the splashing of the rivers is silenced by more and more dams, as we drive more and more of the land's wild voices into the oblivion of extinction, our own languages become increasingly impoverished and weightless, progressively emptied of their earthly resonance.

There is a reason that Muir, Abbey, McCandless got the fu** out of Dodge and went their own way. Abram wrestles philosophically with that need and our need to be in contact with, connected to, the natural world around us.

Studying our surroundings. For me, that yokes together trail running, bird watching, paddleboarding, the various ways I dig exploring outside. It's a framework for examining life and the world around me.

It makes "outside" part of my reading list. It creates a space where reading sends me outside, and my experience outside informs my reading and writing. In the words of George Peppard's Hannibal on the A-Team, "I love it when a plan comes together." Creating existential reasons to avoid shooting the refrigerator.

Bluebirds, Buntings & Paying Attention

2015 has been the year of the bluebird. It's been the year of paying attention. It's been a year of listening to life and of finding happiness in work, relationships, and home. That makes it a fairly banner year thus far.

Eastern Bluebirds have clearly been on Maryland's Eastern Shore for probably all of my 43 years. But I can't say I saw and noticed one prior to this year. And we've been over my thing for the color blue here before. Seeing bluebirds while on a run and coming home to look them up was my first "birding" experience (says the guy with the Great Blue Heron tattoo on his forearm).

Following that, I set up some feeders and sat and watched. I wasn't actively going out birding, just looking at what came around. It helped to be living at a veritable bird haven, but out my windows and while out running on Baileys Neck,  I saw the aforementioned Bluebirds, Cardinals, Red-Bellied Woodpeckers, Northern Flickers, American Goldfinches, Cooper's Hawk, Red-Tailed Hawk, Bald Eagle, Ospreys, Brown Thrashers, Blue Jays, Ruby-Throated Hummingbirds, and Pileated Woodpeckers. Enough to pull me in to wanting to see more.

But it's more than just seeing birds. Author Lynn Thompson, in her memoir, "Birding with Yeats," gets it:

Sometimes I think that the point of birdwatching is not the actual seeing of the birds, but the cultivation of patience. Of course, each time we set out, there's a certain amount of expectation we'll see something, maybe even a species we've never seen before, and that it will fill us with light. But even if we don't see anything remarkable--and sometimes that happens--we come home filled with light anyway.

I'm not that good at patience. But when it comes to finding reasons to be outside and look deeply at the beauty around you, that's a lesson I've taken to heart.

Walking and (nominally) looking for birds at Assateague Island and Pickering Creek over the last couple weeks, the subject of the Indigo Bunting came up. A bird more blue than a bluebird, but not seen as much. Tractor beam on. Pulling up pictures and reading about them, they are around in the spring and summer, and winter in Central America. Hhhmmm... maybe it's time to go visit a friend in Costa Rica :)

But I've got it in my mind, the first bird I want to go seek out and find is an Indigo Bunting. But now I have to wait until spring to do it? Do you have any other buntings? Why, yes. Yes, we do. How about a Snow Bunting?

Mission confirmed. Buntings it is. I don't have a life list of birds; I'm not interested in just going out and checking off one after another. Whether trail running, hiking, biking, longboarding, paddleboarding, or bird watching, I'm of the John Muir mindset:

This grand show is eternal. It is always sunrise somewhere; the dew is never dried all at once; a shower is forever falling; vapor is ever rising. Eternal sunrise, eternal dawn and gloaming, on sea and continents and islands, each in its turn, as the round earth rolls.

Being outside, the looking goes both ways: outward and inward.

Dreams and Understanding

Park ranger is the first job I ever wanted. Really wanted. Daydreamed about. I pictured driving a truck around a national park, clearing trees and trails, helping out visitors, hiking trails, observing wildlife. Then coming home to a log cabin, either solo or with a wife and kids I hadn't pictured yet, hanging out, catching up, writing and reading. My writing and reading would be for me. John Muir, Edward Abbey, Gary Snyder style. That was the dream, life outside and in the world. And now I drive four-plus hours to and from work and sit in a cubicle for most of the day.

Hhmmm.

Understanding. Both yourself and someone else. I don't think I really got that until this last month. That's something I have stared down in the mirror and where I've made my biggest change, I think. Really understanding someone else. Getting out of my own way, my own selfishness, my own head. Maybe it's like empathy, but deeper. Much deeper. It's both easy and hard; hard as shit, maybe impossible until it's there and then, when it is, you wonder how it could not have been there.

I understand. That maybe wasn't true until this last month. It took some rough, heavy life to find it. I get you. I hear you now, when I didn't before, and now I don't know how I didn't. And I'm sorry.

And life feels different.

Dreams and understanding. I've found one. Maybe there's still time for the other.