eThoughts : Been Gone a Long Time

There is a place I go in the mountains to camp. Perhaps it’s that I’ve been going there for a long time, perhaps it’s that the place holds some other representation to me, perhaps it’s a bit of both. But in that place I breathe differently—I breathe like I’m safe, like I’m home, like there is kinship and connection and acceptance.

Yes, I know nature can kill me quickly or slowly—that whatever enjoyment, whatever peace I have is at the mercy of the mountain. Mostly, it seems safe—any problems that arise will arise because of human inattention. And paying attention is crucial as the place is certainly off the beaten path—where I actually camp, I’ve never seen another soul that I didn’t go into the mountains with in the first place.

It is quiet in this place—so still that the loudest sound at night can be one’s own heartbeat. When I’ve been alone up there, that quiet is a bit unnerving—perhaps because the soul is no longer used to being that kind of alone or that kind of quiet.

Like living in our complex world in general, it is easy to get disoriented up there. Going off the trail in the forest is a good way to become lost. I still can’t believe that my body is so unreliable—I’ll track a compass heading, I’ll march the 20 to 100 feet to my sighting point (the forest makes long-range sighting impossible), and I’ll let my body tell me which way is right. Then I’ll take a compass reading and I’ll find that, left up to my body, 50% of the time I’d go off in an inappropriate direction. Though in short distances it wouldn’t matter, in longer walks, a slight angle of deviance in the beginning will put one way off the final destination. Though I know the place well enough that truly getting lost is unlikely, I’ve been disoriented on many occasions—not sure how I wound up where I did. That feeling of becoming disoriented is, like the unusual quiet, a bit unnerving.

And then there was the time I was caught in a lightning storm. I know the basic issues of minimizing the changes of being hit, but after that, it is a chancy issue.

But the mountain is something that touches me deeply, despite the lack of all-will-be-perfect guarantees. It is as though my energy is freed of its usual stiff and formal tuxedo and is allowed to be casual and to run free. It is a place where I feel I belong.

I also have those feelings on long stretches of a quiet beach—walking in the sand and feeling the wind and air, and listening to the gulls and sea do their intimate dance.

Desert mornings and evenings are also wondrous—so alive, so teeming with life and energy. Even during a summer day, one can feel life napping—wisely resting until nature’s oven backs off and lets the earth’s heat escape into the sky, allowing time for all to emerge and interact with the transitions between day and night, night and day.

These are places of the soul, for the soul. It is the heart of nurturing. These are places we do not much have in the world of dealing with people. Despite the dangers, nature doesn’t lie, but people do. And, unlike nature, people don’t know themselves or their environment very well at all. But when we are around people that we love and that love us—that is a place like the mountains, the desert, and the sea. When we work together, there is that place. When we have found the one that will be our true mate, there is that place. And those places of being safe around others, like being in nature, does not mean there are no dangers, it only means that there is also nurturing.

It is this way as well when we have found our work. And when we have found our physical home, including the place where we’ll live until we die.

Some of this nurturing, of this exquisite feeling of home and of belonging, and of fulfilling our potential, does not seem to be reached in many of us, which makes the parts we have found all the more precious—though those parts alone cannot match nurturing in its entirety.

It is a journey, a well-documented and acknowledged journey, to go home again—to the place we probably never left, to the place that is never, ever the same. It is also a place of danger and of nurturing—the contrasts of safety and risk that stir our learning and our souls.

Sometimes in this journey, when we are quiet in the mountains, or hearing the music of sea and beach, or seeing the desert’s emptiness full of life, or in finding our life’s work, or being in the places we’ll live and die, or in having found our mate, or a sense of community, we all share a feeling of having been away too long—far too long.

Sometimes in this journey, when we are feeling anxious and do not know why, perhaps it is because we are not home.

In the midst of all of our human endeavors and of getting lost in subgoals, maybe our peace in some places, around some people and our anxiety in some places, and around some people, will help us to turn away from our sometimes wayward wanderings, our journey at angles to our true path, and maybe we’ll remember the home we are really trying to find—again.