walk

I met a hiker early in my trek last week who said that to walk the trail, especially alone, was to embark on a spiritual journey.  How could it be any less?  And maybe that is the most compelling reason for walking alone.  To be alone, in the quiet that is the inevitable result of stripping one's existence down to its most elemental form, opens up a big space, an enormous opportunity for one's attention.  It's the blessing of a mind liberated by feet that have been given the authority to do what they were designed to do.

As it is with all spiritual journeys, it's not like I chose the Appalachian Trail, but more like it chose me ... long before I accepted it.  I remember the first time we drove through the mountains of West Virginia and Virginia when I was a little kid.  Staring up at the steep green slopes from my backseat window, I wondered about the mystery beneath the trees, tried hard to imagine what it would be like to walk over the ground among them.  I don't know exactly when I first heard of the AT but I was thrilled by its potential to answer these mysteries.  Even after my hikes, I continue to be nothing short of amazed by the existence of this narrow corridor, a sacred footpath -- over 2000 connected miles of it, that belongs to anyone and everyone who would entertain the call to walk it, to live it.

It doesn't come easy for me.  It seems, for all kinds of reasons, that I am meant walk alone.  In addition, I am a mostly anxious person who lives in chronic fear of all sorts of real and imagined horrors.  Alone in the dark in the woods there is no escape from any of them, but in spite of excuses and plenty of sensible reasons to stay away, neither I, nor anyone else, can talk me out of it.  Something deep within me is in love with a place where I can still exist with so few requirements, requirements that have been reduced to the most essential and the most outside.  Like all love affairs it is impractical and unpredictable, capable of lifting the open-minded/hearted spirit to inconceivable highs and also of bringing it deeply low.  It is like living in a narrow universe of extreme elation and despair that I often want to leave, but at the same time, can't bring myself to do so. It's not that being there necessarily makes me happy.  It makes me feel, in spite of however temporary and small, that I am nothing more and nothing less than what I was meant to be.

I have been struggling with my "re-entry."  The return from that slender stretch of fundamental living is so abrupt and so dramatic and so immediately consuming.  After all that time in the outside world, I feel strangely fragile in all this atmosphere.  It is much more dense, louder, in this world and I just want to manage to bring some of that quiet with me.  It seems impossible to avoid the clutter of our trappings but I want somehow to reduce some of this life to that kind of essential -- shed the nagging worry over things like schedules and maintenance and repair and bills and laundry and...  In that quiet it is so much easier to identify what I need, versus what I want, and then to just pray about that.  It is a whole world of gratitude, not just a moment of thanks, but a constant lesson in simple gifts:  "I am a humble servant ... thank you for helping me over these rocks without breaking my neck ... for keeping me from falling in this stream ... for carrying me and my pack up this mountain ... for this dry night ... for shelter in this pouring rain ... thank you for this guidance ... for sending this friend ... for this open ridge top ... for this breeze, these trees, this bird's song, these clouds, this pure black sky, these stars ... for all of this love."  So maybe I am getting it, step by step, and carrying it back a little at a time.  At some point I may come back with the lessons fully learned ... with an understanding that my return to this world doesn't necessarily mean that I have to leave that one.