I’ve been gone a while now—school and all. It is finished, 5 years of seminary and well worth it, the 5 years.
It is time to sit on the farm for 30 days and see what is, write, pick veggies, drink coffee and beer at different times of the day, and pray—above all dialogue with Life that is here until it isn’t.
It is also time to go to Big Bend, the closest desert. I think I will do it by bike this year, or some other slow way of getting there. I hate to miss the smells in a car-the flowers, diesel fumes, and dead stuff in the ditch (no one ever sees it-it just rots, but a biker can smell it).
It’s time…….
and yes thank to the one who said, start blogging again. I so want to get back on the PCT, but first I need to sit!
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.
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.
This has been a long wait here in Redding, just getting stuff and then sorting it-then giving the excess( pack is to heavy) away. I could learn as much from getting ready as actually going on this walk.
Spiritual Formation 