Thoughts on how to conduct oneself after the adventure…
Monhegan Island 5 September 2019
Who is to say what is adventure and what is not? I return from the mountains and the whirr of my life scoops me up and whisks me away like salt in the ocean air. Coming home and seeing the glassiness in my father's eyes and the silver turn to white in my mother's hair feels just as much of a race with time that any alpine start I will ever wake to.
While writing this I am on Monhegan Island in Maine. My mother, dog and I are sitting on the rocks watching the sea. After a summer in the mountains, I am resting. Only having been out of the field a few days, I must constantly remind myself of that---time to rest. The adventure is over. But is it really? I ask this honestly with the deepest curiosity surrounding exactly what it is I am supposed to do after the adventure, after I have done my laundry and donned a new pair of street clothes that to most may seem completely ordinary but in fact comprise an outfit I had designed in my mind weeks prior while attempting to wash my stinky shirt in a plastic bag filled with soap and water. When I ask this I am asking about the transition that we so often see as a step from climbing to resting but in reality is not. Often it is more of a jump from summit euphoria down into the rushing river of all we put on pause or asked for space from in order to explore. Not only is it a jump directly into the next adventure but there is a continuity that up until this point feels unnamed and unspoken. I have begun to see my ventures away from cell reception up mountains and out to sea as mere continuations of my journey into this life and that separating them out as "expeditions" creates a rift in my rhythms and a misperception of what is rest and what is running.
Some famous lost generation writer once said something to the effect of "how can I possibly write of Paris when I am there, I am much too close" After the adventure I find that my mind is still there, in the mountains, sleeping snuggled between adventuremates in a tent that if we are lucky is warm and dry. And, in fact, more often than not I find that during the adventure my mind wanders away from the mountains. It is on the summits that my mind unpacks the rapids of my daily life and sitting by the sea shore after the adventure that the jewels of my ever shifting consciousness burble up in the memory of the Wyoming night sky.
This call and response continuity that relies on both restlessness and exhaustion, clarity and confusion is where I direct my curiosity. What to do? How to live when one has seen but sees no longer? I return home to my parent's divorce and messages from my ex-girlfriend and the clarity I found in thoughts on them threatens to turn murky as my mind tires from the long days on the trail out. How do I rest and integrate? How do I end one adventure while another has already started?
West Seattle 28 September 2019
Who is to say when after ends. When something else begins? I think not. We begin again with every breath--we die too. While a month later I am far from the peaks we summited and have not spoken to any of the people I slept next to for weeks since we said goodbye in a parking lot, still I find them whirring through my mind and soul--if I am lucky I take time to listen to what they have to say. The adventure is not over. It has continued into a terrain that is far more difficult to navigate than any mountain pass. For daily life is about navigation of the mind and as of yet there are no maps for that. After the adventure is often a shit show. We return remade to the world. We exalt in our elevation in consciousness and competence but no one understands and in our frustration we quickly give back in to the rush of our lives and soon forget our summit feelings.
But then occasionally, sometimes weeks later, sometimes years later, something in the great web of the day to day reminds us of the luminescent people we were scrambling over the mountainsides. It is like a jolt of sunlight passing through your mind. Just one memory sends you circling and laughing and believing in all that is beautiful and good.
It is visceral for me. As if stardust is being pumped through my veins. I almost always forget immediately what the original thought was---the power of the mountains coursing through me fills me with such tangible energy that my mind goes blank. I call that wonder.
Now-- it is this next moment that is the point of it all, the moment after the mind journey, for it is in this moment that we can either lose or find ourselves. And it is up to us which actually happens.
After this return of the adventure I am often stunned.....then the feelings roll in. Doubt, sorrow and longing come banging on the walls of my heart. Why can't I return to that way of being all the time? How could I have forgotten all that? Why haven't I been living the way I said I would when I was off imbibing in the pristine waters of the earth? It is in this moment that we all have a choice to listen to, to live these questions....or to not. My other option is the point of it all. It is to integrate, to celebrate, to rejoice. No matter how quickly the light fades---welcome it. Celebrate its entry into the mundane. Dance in your mind, soul and physical body for creativity's triumph over monotony. The fires that are lit by the soul never go out----after the adventure, they simply go within, no longer the tangible flames around which we huddle by night under the starry sky. After the adventure is only more adventure and while after particularly poignant expeditions we may barrel forward with clarity in our hearts, it is inevitable that we will lose it at some point. We are perpetually in a state of remembering and forgetting but the important part is that we DO remember! And when we do remember-- don't waste it. Allow the sacred, the wonder-filled to flow into the adventure of your life. There is sanctity in all life-- we remember this so easily while surrounded by ancient mountain cirques and cascading waterfalls yet forget it so easily when the dishes are not done in the morning and there is the work of daily life to be done.
When these moments of clarity come to me, I stop. I honor the wonder as if flows through me. Then, pushing the emotions of self doubt or oppression away, I begin to draw, then paint, then write, then dance, then sing. I express the artistry of who I am allowing the memory of the sacred manifest before me. The sacred is always there, after the adventure we must continue our search, even when it dives deep and out of distracted sight.
