from here to there

wood
Originally uploaded by c'estbonne

When I first started camping on mountains alone, it never occurred to me to be afraid. And when I dutifully considered that perhaps there was good reason for me to feel fear, I still didn't.

Of course, there were times now and then when I heard a noise in the night, and regretted a moment of carelessness in not hanging my food properly. Or when I found myself alone on a mountainside where a mountain lion had been spotted the day before. Or when a rutting bull moose (which I thought was a bear) spent an hour and a half grunting near my campsite in the dark. But it never occurred to me to turn back. Or if it did, it was just my mind running around in circles; the rest of me, the core, the anchor, had already decided.

But the rest of my life has not worked that way. Somewhere, somehow, someone told me I should be afraid. My mind, being diligent, believed them, and passed that experience on to the rest of me.

When I look at this fallen tree, I see how things change depending on how we look at them. This perspective makes the log seem interminable, reaching ahead into the future. Another angle could make its girth seem insurmountably thick. A closeup would make the spurs appear deadly, like the shadowed teeth on the rock. Or these same views can also reveal the detailed beauty of texture, weathering, grain, imperfection--the genuine story of the tree.

Going into the wilderness, for some reason, was the only way I could ever reach a part of me that was bigger than my frightened mind. But it's wilderness, also, which is teaching me that everything we encounter is part of a story--part of our own story. Within that story, we are its perfect witness, its only teller. We have only to allow the story to unravel, beginning to end, root to tip, and to let it be ours.

disheveled

partying in the sun
Originally uploaded by c'estbonne

Have you ever felt that no matter how many details you attend to, parts of you are still sticking out in every direction, wild and frayed and just trying to find the Light?

That's how life has been for me, for a while now. My mind is like a wind I cannot see, coming from every direction. It lifts each carefully tucked corner as soon as I turn away, raises dust storms and questions and shadows, shifts direction to evade understanding. I stand up, and it knocks me down. I choose a path, and it is obliterated. I stay put, and it swirls around me, urging me to action. This is a dance I know well, but somehow have still not mastered.

Of course, the key is to bend, to find true strength in flexibility rather than in resistance. And in the bending, the wind's hold cannot catch us, and we begin to notice the strange harmony of the disheveled world around us.

I was sitting on my third floor balcony this evening when a collection of starlings flocked up and assembled noisily in the large cottonwood tree in front of me. They were a wind in themselves, so many wings and tails, so much commotion, their chatter like an army of squeaky wheels being rolled for oiling. Already they wore their winter plumage, a contentious pattern of black and white speckles, and their beaks were winter black (as opposed to breeding yellow in spring).

But their gregarious activity delighted me. Although each squeaked and whistled its own separate opinion, regardless of all the other voices around it, they were clearly all of the same mind. And when a small gust of breeze kicked up, they all rose from the tree of one accord, the sound of their collective wings a whoosh of feathered wind, a scattered beating of a single heart knowing where it wanted to go.