Travel notes on persons and places while exploring the same
Author: Elroy
Graduate of Texas A&M in studies of Animal Science and Veterinary Medicine, 1974 and 1977. Private veterinary practice for 25 years, U.S. Army for 3 years.
Graduate of the Seminary of the Southwest in Austin ,Texas in Spiritual Formation-Spiritual Direction.
Currently deciding which trail to take.
It can be reverse thinking, but if one knows how to do something well enough, maybe one can find ways of not doing it- the contra thinking.
I’m not an expert in this area, but I have experienced lostness more times than I would like to confess. The episodes have ranged from slight disorientation resulting in more distance and time in the woods than planned , to server bile producing panic with near death consequences from prolonged disorientation in the raw elements.
There are several underlying themes in the etiology of getting lost, the most paramount is the lost one doesn’t know he/she is lost until-he/she becomes aware(if they do). I suggest even in the state of not knowing you are off course, one is indeed off course in a time and place of lostness, and when one realizes they are lost, feelings come in literally screwing your day.
I have trouble seeing my own blindness to new ways of though, doing, etc., but I really have trouble listening to someone who is fundamentally different from me. I know how I’m supposed to be with others even those contra, but I have walls between how I am and what I imagine I am.
It’s much like getting lost, as soon as I get over my anxiousness and panic, I can hear and for the first time have a chance of getting unstuck. There can be great assets in times of lostness and in facing persons poles apart from our view of the world. Both require not being other or outside focused and staying centered in where and who you are in the moment. It could be that Life presents both as learning opportunities to practice saving your own ass, when faced with the worst of destabilizing conditions.
When your arugula is to mature, stir it in with the beans and chicken that you were going to eat anyway(as if you were). Let the mix sit till it comes to “itself” , the spiciness of the asian arugula will set your mouth free.
The saints that I admire highly recommend sitting in your “weeds” till you come to yourself, once stewing in your own juices you thought would do you in, flavor comes. Something other than yourself-yet it’s been there all along. What was thought to be to old and to bitter has come to flavor our whole dish– it was in the DNA of our makeup the whole time. Let us embrace our crap, sit in our weeds, embrace the bitterness that can flavor our whole lives in to meaning.
Let’s cook our bitterest herb and show it off–in weakness is life. Get it.
Most animals if they are hurt will go to a den or a covered place, there they don’t have to expend a lot of effort while healing. If they sense they are safe their wounds will naturally heal faster than if alone. The community I am part of in Austin, Texas is a safe place to heal. My part is to show up best I’m able at the time, do my best to be present-the rest is innate to the tradition.
I recently audited a writing class lead by a professor[1] that emphasized the idea of writing one’s truth when using words as metaphor to convey life: this class like the SSW(Seminary of The Southwest) community relieves one of having to be “on guard” or expending energy in protecting your tender parts-it’s a more spacious environment than the alternative, pretense and illusion. Living in an environment with people more interested in being true, vulnerable and gracious toward Life, it’s hard not to be moved toward being whole, healed.
I came to this school to learn how to communicate the passion I have for dirt, roots, rocks, thin air, germination, uncharted trails, and animal screams. I love to be in uninterrupted distance…to be justly small and full of awe, but solitude needs community to call one on his or her shit, ego. It takes authentic people living in real time and space encountering pain and joy without denial of either, to heal other people-to call them out of themselves into a Self. I have experienced healing here, without being smothered with the directions or fantasy of others. It is true what my first advisor[2] said, “Well, it seems you will need to learn a new vocabulary for this desire you have”. I couldn’t agree more, so on it goes-the gathering of truth.
It’s a mystery to me, but if you want to go to the edge of a wilderness, physical or internal, it is imperative you be in a community available for the truth to move, and open to what may show up in the Un-Calculated.[3] Nature seems to love diversity and play, “divine grab-ass”(watch animals at play), I need some healing……
<<<<>>>>
[1] Thanks to Dr. Claire Colombo and the creative students of F2015, Writing as Ministry.
The deadliest of sins for me is ease. Things go my way for a long time, or even a day, I think-“I got it, this is life”. Why this way? Why is ease better that “not ease”?
Men and women through out time have fled ease, because it lacked substance, it built a deadly ego, “a sure thing”.
Giving up my auto for a day, skimping on food, un-plug all my electric stuff, I know I’m off trail when I can’t sit for hand-journaling in the morning until I check my phone charge. Digital suck.
Sure cure for ease? Go to Leadville, Colorado and enter a burrow race.The lessons learned from a burrow are light years beyond a prosperity message, or a self-enrichment seminar.
As a veterinarian for some years, I’ve noticed most animals will run out of an enclosed area if given a chance. The psalmist uses the metaphor-like calves released form the stall. As a creatures that shares this planet, I find it helpful if I go outside my enclosure every 30 minutes-breath deeply about 10 times , walk for 5 minutes and go back in. Try it, you may find it freeing: use it in the Pomodor Technique.
This past summer while attending the Ira Progoff school of Intensive Journaling, it took me all week to come to a mantra or a distilling of my time there into one saying. It was a deep rumbling I couldn’t get into words until I finally did enough time in writing and walking , writing and walking. The mantra, “Open the gate, I’m going outside”, expresses a work still to be discovered in the senior part of my life. To get to this place that meant something- a habit, a discipline, of exposure to the outside is necessary for me, and then a return to the work at hand, writing my walk.
Open the gate, I’m going out, may be freedom for your work and walk.
“Each existence is engaged in finding the way of life and of being that will be true to its own nature.” (AJW, p 34) ,
The picture is my paternal grandparents house. It was very simple, all the contents could have been put in several travel trunks-the way they traveled to the old homestead from Missouri.
It seems our culture will have to work doubly hard to get to simple and include our progress, but it also seems doubly important for our sanity’s sake and the globe we do so.
Living out of a backpack for a few months of your life, where you unload all your possessions daily in a pile, could help us in getting a better picture of what we really need to live. This same few months may even give us space to re-define live.
There is nothing worse than while filling your water bottles from a bubbling brook, you notice a moose, deer, horse or other recognizeable excrement in your source-in you living stream of water. It happens to most everyone who fequents the backcountry-what to do?
One has several options when faced with “turd-water”: collect your water above the contaminate (where water is coming out of the ground, the “first water”), treat the water you have(such as filter, chemicals, etc.), or take your chances that pure water is farther down the trail and pour out the foul stuff. All this may seem silly, but if your tongue is stuck to the roof of your mouth, it’s hot, and you are not prepaired for treating your water-odds are you will drink it, contamination and all, and take your chances.
The worst animal for source contamination in the woods is the human because he/she can be so deceptive and hide their “contaminate” better than most animals (usually doing their business to close to the source, thinking e coli don’t travel far).
Treat your spiritual tradition the same way as you do your water sources. Go check your original source before you start practicing for the health of your inner life-go as far back as you can to the original “spark” that feeds you.
Usually we won’t make the effort to ferrit out original works, it takes to much effort and there are plenty persons ready to help fill our water bottles with their “brand of water”. Don’t just buy into it because it’s easy, listen deeply-can you hear the water running? If you hear it running, go check it out because you can bet after all these years there have been people dumping their waste near the stream.
This last week has been the hardest of weeks in a while. As if coming out of the wilderness into civilization after several months with injury isn’t hard enough, I was faced with the worst thing that could happen to me short of death- that of being sentenced to total rest and room confinement.
Friday night the injuries that had been repaired surgically, began to become a new level of infected. I was in trouble with something invisible, bacteria, and it was a weekend in Austin Tx.
The seminary community I’m a part of took care of getting me to and from the Seton E.R. here in Austin. The short version of what happened medically was re-xay, lab work and I.V. antibiotics with new medications for the infection. The long version started the next day when the happy medicine wore off and I was facing the reality of finishing my week of bed rest with an infected foot in elevation. This was about all the suck I could tolerate- at the same time I knew humans every second are asked to face the hardest suck of their lives-physical lose, mental and emotional lose, financial ruin, broken families, and ruin from attachments and addictions.
I had other stressors come in the room this weekend and want to live along side my “draining toe”. These stressors were to add to the opportunity to have a “woeis me party“, but what would be the pay off? I had been to plenty of these parties before and they always ended the same, they were illusions to an opportunity. The great overlooked opportunity to sit with my suck.
This same opportunity for a suck party had come up on the trail when I found my toes out of joint after falling off the ledge–I could add to the suck with self sympathy, or instead a little self-compassion and a decision to get out of there in some form of reality, because all the illusion and outside helps were to anemic to show up in any real way to save my life.
The same has been the case in this small dorm room for over a week now, concerning helps. The outside helps have shown up when needed everytime, the perceived necessities of text messages, the perfect family, the perfect relationships, the perfect hike and surgery are all of a realm that will not deliver me in the direction I want to go, to the place I am at. Time and time again, in the mundaneness of walking, itching, drinking and eliminating –Grace would pop through, and I knew when it did-it had been there all along-I had been to busy being in another place and time to enjoy the itches and the hungers-I was missing the beauty all around me.
I remember the old Anglican speaker in Kansas City who said, “we moderns put up Bible verses and pieces of wisdom on our bathroom walls, the Hebrews would offer prayers of thanks for their bowels working.” I found myself so busy relinquishing my life to a past or a future- to much of the real trail was being missed. It was simple, I had to find another job for my mind, it was screwing up my walk.
The first job I had for my mind-thoughts, wonderings, guilts, shames, etc.-was to care for the weakest of my body parts, my toes that were out of socket. While I was hiking out of the wilderness injured, whenever they were touched by anything, I automatically went into a near death experience….it hurt very much! So, I addressed the mind, be it brain or the energy that is arranged by the brain, it needed to live in the left side of my body and help my foot dodge all debris or it basically didn’t have a job.
By now, if you are still reading, you maybe wondering about my sanity and/or I.Q level? I don’t blame you. I was desperate, I had no way of emergency communication. I could sit and wait for others to come by, which could be days, and I was running out of food. I needed whatever it was going to take to come from inside of myself, regardless of what I thought of my abilities or my ego up until that point. I was in need of something, I didn’t know what, and I didn’t know if I had it inside of me if I did know what.
It was there, somewhere inside and it wasn’t of my doing. The “trail provides” is a common saying on the PCT, it’s not a new age saying or back to nature rhetoric: it’s something very needed that shows up when you are out of yourself-call it what you will, but be careful it’s skittish, and if you analyze or text about it, it maybe slow to show-ha!
This has been the week of the great fast, all those things that via for attention by promising to fix all that hurts-I practice dropping them and see if the mind doesn’t have a better purpose for that time other than diversion from the pain-that is the teacher here. Pain, boredom, and aloneness the gateway to a great hike because you know they always lead to a open place where you can see past your own crap…. Have a good hike.
Both feet worked for almost 700 miles, but I’m coming off to get repairs, the primary one being done on a big toe that is dislocated. It is a long story, but the bottom line is I was on the way to the Adventist Boys Camp in Oregon when it became apparent I couldn’t face the pain another day: if possible I needed to get off trail and get diagnosed.
I was engaged in conversation with a young girl at Olallie Lake Resort, telling her my trail stories and my issue with the accident that injured my foot, when her dad raised up from a near by hammock and said, “can I look at that toe? I’m a paramedic with the fire department.” I said, “sure”, and the next thing you know they had taken me on as their family project iby getting me out of the Oregon woods and into civilization for treatment. The next morning with help of Karla from Olallie Resort and Jerry, my new adoting parent, I was x-rayed at a very nice Salem, Oregon facility sixty miles away. The MD said the toe would need to be reduced into place to get out of pain and I could stay in Oregon a while or go home-I said if I was to be laid up, I would rather be in Texas with family and friends. Aly, my daughter in law, drove 10 hours and delivered me to their home in Redding, Ca., where I’m waiting on a flight home to Austin, Texas.
I have mixed feelings about leaving the trail, but I had no choice. I miss my peoples and grandchildren this can be remedied by being home and rolling around the floor with fat babies(if they leave the foot alone).. I know where I stopped on the trail, the exact tree, and I know how to get back to that place. So, until then I will write down some of the memories and stories while I heal.
I started on the Canadian border with lots of greenery, wildlife and water. When I stopped there was much smoke over the Northwest from the forest fires and water was being monitored in Washingto, a first I understand.
This section of the U.S. is going through some tough times of record heat and drought. One of the issues related to the hot temperatures is the increased temperature of the ocean waters in this area. I don’t understand it, but the locals say this alters all kinds of sea life that many depend on for a livelyhood. It all brings back memories of the last 6 years in Central Texas, another record drought.
i’m finishing this post 2 weeks after I started it. Usually this draft would e forgotten or discorded because it isn;t good enough or I’m in post surgical pain so I’ll have an excuse, but you will get it reguardless because this is the most passionate thing I’ve done in years-just walk for over 2 months.
I was talking to my friend tonight and told her I haven’t connected deeply with other humans in such a short span of time in my life-what is it ? I’m not tauting walking about the woods as the “second coming”, but I am saying it’s much more than an adventure, it’s a pilgirmage into a place where people are pretty well stripped to the essentials. it seems the crap you brought to the “walk about” that you thought would get you through-well, it isn’t near enough. There is an essence in us all that I really believe if we can turn loose of what we fear, it’s there that we can see why we are made to walk. So, walk well.
If you go, may you walk well.
If you can’t walk, crawl as you can,
All movements count, even those steps backwards
Should you need anything, look no farther than inside yourself, if there is nothing there, wait for it-
Stay with the “trail”, it will provide what you need.
When your arugula is to mature, stir it in with the beans and chicken that you were going to eat anyway(as if you were). Let the mix sit till it comes to “itself” , the spiciness of the asian arugula will set your mouth free.
The Source:
Spiritual Formation 