Three Simple Questions: challenge

Sunday, January 4, 2015

PILGRIMAGE IN MYSTICAL SHOES

WHO AM I?

I started this blog just over a year ago to make a Pilgrimage - to consciously walk in Mystical Shoes. I didn’t know how many blog entries I could write when I started, but I wanted to find out. The only way to find out is to do it and see how it went. A year sounded like more than I could actually do, unless I was genuinely committed. Because I wanted to change as a writer, I took on the challenge.

Mystical? What’s that? I didn’t know what I would write about exactly, except that I would, as Walt Whitman said, “Try to confront the growing excess and arrogance of realism.”

So, I set out wearing Mystical Shoes down a long timeline and attempted to write things that are imaginative, spinal and essential.

Mystical Shoes? Sounds kinda sweet and soft, doesn’t it? Like maybe a “glass slipper” which could be transformative for Cinderella? Well, the reality of the Pilgrimage part – getting into those dang Mystical Shoes day-after-day and then going where they carry you is not easy. Ever heard of “Seven League Boots”? Shoes will change you, for good or ill, they ARE transformative.

WHY AM I HERE?

If you haven’t seen the portrayal of Cheryl Strayed’s feet in the film version of “Wild”, see that and then read how she writes about the reality of the damage to her toes and feet in her book. Your feet – and your shoes – are where your impulse or idealism meets the reality of your journey.

One part is the shoes and whether or not they fit. She pitched her hiking boots and used duct tape and Teevas. What was I going to do when these Mystical Shoes hurt? Could they kill me?

The second part is the terrain. My Pilgrimage in Mystical Shoes put me over terrain which caused me to quit several times. Seriously, I told myself that I couldn’t go any further. Like what idiot would climb a mountain to read poetry to the dead? But, I gave myself a good talking to, paused to drink water and eat GORP, whined a bit, and went on.

I think that is the only thing any of us on long journeys can do, be it a physically brutal journey, a jail sentence, some marriages I know, devotion to causes like OWS, a little bout of cancer or whatever life gives you – the death of a loved one, is to go on.

You’ve just got to go on. Bear the pain. Bear the grief. Bear the love and the loss and go on. One step at a time.

Your feet will carry you into life, and many times you won’t know why, only later can you figure out what it was all about. You can’t get any learning until it is over but then your dear departed may help you.

WHAT DO I WANT?

Whatever trails you are walking, make sure you have the RIGHT shoes.

When I volunteered at SCI Graterford, PA, a maximum security prison, I learned that we each wear different shoes and the shoes we wear are EXTREMELY important. The shoes I chose to wear when I first went to visit was a pair of cowboy boots. Six months later, after I was co-leading a weekly group, one of the inmates asked me why I had worn those boots. He told me that some of the men had serious questions about who I was based on my boots. Boots have a meaning and a culture far removed from this Pennsylvania prison. But, over time, the feelings created by the boots eased as they got to know me. Inmates all wore trainers, but as he kindly educated me, there are trainers and then there are TRAINERS. Silly me. I thought trainers were for exercise. He said, “Why did I think there were stores devoted to trainers some of which were expensive? The brands represented gangs. Why did Gucci make trainers that cost $1,000 or more.”

It is because, when you wear a uniform of any sort (military, police, Catholic school, hospital scrubs, prisoner); status, identity, and power are in the shoes YOU can wear. Some part of us is a culture of individualists merely held together by Gucci trainers or Mystial Shoes like Cowboy boots.

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Sunday, December 28, 2014

ADAPTATION – NOT DEAD YET

WHO AM I?

According to Darwin, we live our lives under the spell of Adaptation. Adaptation is the process by which we become accustomed to change as it slowly occurs. Our lives evolve slowly day to day, week to week, month to month, year to year.

Adaptation makes us "Slow Blind” we are hardly aware of the changes as they occur. We don't notice the incremental changes.

Many times the meaning of each of the steps which has led up to the future, or the magnitude of some those steps, is not observable in the moment they happened. Our brain weaves them into a seamless whole.

Only later when we take time to look back at what happened, can we begin to become aware of the steps that led up to the present. Their import only becomes visible on reflection.

WHY AM I HERE?

Last August, at 2 in the morning I set out to climb Longs Peak (14,265’) in Colorado. You climb at night in order to summit before 10 a.m. Deadly lightning storms start around noon. I didn’t intend on summiting but aimed to reach Chasm Lake (12,000’+) by dawn (6:30 a.m.)

I am well adapted to living. I am “slow blind” to death. I rarely think about my own death but am shaken out of my adaptive, slow blind mode when a friend dies. Then, after a while, the day-to-day of life and living seals over our awareness of death and dying.

The way I am attempting to become more aware of death so I can plan for my own, is to come close to death. Like this climb. This is my third “not dead yet” climb of Longs Peak since I had my heart attack in ’01. This is one way I do something very, very physically challenging, not to die in the process, but to live longer. Believe me, it takes me months of gym work to prep for one day’s climb.

The second thing I do is to spend time reading to my “dear departed.” On this climb I will arrive at dawn, read poetry to my “dear departed” and then read their names aloud to the mountain. Last time I did this, the mountain replied with beautiful colors of dawn.

WHAT DO I WANT?

We seem to view ourselves as “special” beings that are disconnected from the natural world. While we may be hunters and fishermen that see how animals are connected with and Moon, we believe ourselves to be different entirely separate from one paradigm and immersed in a paradigm totally independent.

Climbing a mountain at night will erase those kind of thoughts of somehow being “precious.” The trail was steep. I wore a headlamp. I was passed by young “trail runners” who literally ran around me! The temperature plummeted. My joints felt like I was pummeled in a full-contact football game. The altitude had a significant physiological affect – at 12,000’ my breathing was labored, my energy vanished, everything went more slowly, and then slowed again the higher I got.

I finally got to Chasm Lake, crouched behind a rock and started to freeze while I waited for dawn. It was 40-degrees, showering ice pellets with 60-mph winds – the winds were so strong Rangers would not permit attempts to summit.

Half-frozen, bruised, exhausted; I stood at dawn and read the poetry for my dead, and then their names, slowly. They seemed somehow near to me and because I was so physically stressed, perhaps I was closer to them because I was flooded with memories.

Once you revisit memories in a powerful way and you see the good and evil in the path up the mountain of your life, the memories move further away and have less of a power. If you can rise above the past, of the memories, you may also get free from the spell of Adaptation you have made in order to survive and protect yourself. This gives you the capacity to greet your future in freedom. With the rising of the sun on Longs Peak I made my way down back into my day-to-day life, feeling half-dead, but not dead yet.