Mountain Peace

This post is dedicated to my dear mother who is facing a great struggle in her life.  My mom and I are similar in many ways, but one of our strongest ties is our love for the mountains.  This love also translates into an addiction to the sports that we do in the mountains.  We are aggressive participants in these sports and often push ourselves past healthy limits.  As my mom faces a diagnosis that may take away her ability to participate freely in these activities, I am taken back to the moment I ruptured the disk in my back and the two years I spent thinking that I may never be able to play in my mountains again.  Because I clung so desperately to these sports as the source of my identity, giving them up felt like losing myself.  This identity was how I related to the world around me.  It gave me a tribe to be a part of and was the reason behind almost every choice that I made.  I lived in Buena Vista because there was climbing, biking, skiing, and rafting five minutes away.  I chose my friends based on their skill level in the sport that I was focusing on at the time.  I chose my job based on the hours it allowed me to be outside.  These sports became my master and I their slave.  It had been so natural for me to take on these sports as my identity because so many people around me did as well and it gave me a very easy way to relate to them and to myself.  I never had to ask myself too many questions because the answers were always the same.  I always chose the path that brought me closer to my sports.  The danger of choosing an easy source of identity like this is that when I lost it, I became like a pile of bones without the muscles or brain: completely incapable of moving.

Later I realized that the biggest loss in this process was not the loss of my sports but the loss of my connection to the mountains.  In my bitterness for losing the ability to participate in my favorite sports, I lost my site of the beauty around me.  A big snow storm that once brought me such joy as I watched it take over the town from my seat in front of the fire now made me angry.  I was angry that the powder would be incredible the next day and that I would have to watch as my friends left for the mountain leaving me smoldering on my own.  The beauty of mother nature was lost to me because every time I faced her I was met with all of the activities I could no longer do.  Instead of feeling grateful for what I could still receive from her beauty, I just felt handicapped and broken.  I was trapped by my own body.  The physical pain was nothing compared to the psychological pain that was taking over my mind.

I had to leave Buena Vista and change my life completely to rebuild an identity that was not built upon these sports.  That is what I have slowly been working on here in Geneva, but it is not easy.  My new spiritual path and the intellectual stimulation of the foreign culture and my university classes are helping me to redevelop other sides of myself that had become weak.  As my back heals and I am once again able to restart some of the sports that I had left behind, I feel the pull of my old addiction returning.  How easy it is to return to this one source that feeds my ego's needs.  Last week I was reminded of this weakness as I was climbing through the mountains with a friend.  I had wanted to go for an easy hike, but my friend enjoys pushing himself.  I followed unwilling to give in.  As I was climbing a snow covered gorge clinging to an iron cable to avoid slipping back over the edge while dodging ice chunks falling from the cliff above, I had one thought go through my mind; "this is not how I show love to my body."  Sure enough I slipped on the ice and twisted my knee.  For one week I could not do much of anything and I was eternally grateful to this injury.  I thanked it over and over for reminding me of my limits and for bringing me back to the reason that I go to the mountains.  I do not go to the mountains to push myself to some new limit or to reach some new goal, I go to the mountains to find peace in their beauty.

This weekend my knee was still recovering so I took the cable car up the local mountain with a thermos of hot tea.  I found a silent spot on a rock overlooking the entire valley and sat sipping my tea with mother nature.  The longer I sat still, the more things I started to see.  Birds starting coming down from the trees and hopping closer and closer.  A spider slowly lowered himself down from the branches above onto my lap.  It was so still that I could even hear the colorful leaves snap from their home on the tree and drift slowly down to their new resting place on the ground.  I did not have to move at all to enjoy mother nature.  I simply sat and had a cup of tea with her letting her tell me about the fall season and how she was slowly preparing for winter.  In losing my mobility, I gained something much greater; my ability to be still long enough to really experience the world around me.  Once I realized that my enjoyment of the mountains was not dependent on my capability to conquer them through sport, my love for them grew to a whole new level.  They will always be there to comfort me and provide me with a refuge from the busy world below whether I am capable of moving through them or whether I simply sit among them in peace.

So dearest mother look not at what you are losing but what you are gaining.  There is always beauty around you, you will just have to change how you relate to it.          

Enemies

Lately I've been meditating on what I consider to be my enemies.  After I identify what they are, I try to deconstruct my mental formations that label them as so.  Through this process I hope to realize that I have no real enemies and that what I consider to be an enemy is simply a construction of my own misconceptions.  While doing this, I came to realize that I consider most men to be my enemy; young, old, big or small they all get categorized as an enemy.  When in the presence of a man, I immediately put my guard up.  This guard keeps me at arms length and never allows a real connection to develop.  While trying to bring this barrier down, I was met with a lot of resistance within myself.  My mind was fighting back telling me that this barrier is necessary and protects me from the evil that men carry within them.  I do not think that there is one cause for this fear and I think it is present in many women.  It could have been passed on to us from previous generations, taught to us through media, or developed from personal experiences.  I would love to approach every man with no fear yet I believe that a certain amount of fear is useful.  Maybe fear is not the right word but at least a prudence that keeps us aware of the risks.  Many times I have found myself in unsafe situations because I had too much trust in someone that I knew too little.  There is nothing worse than being on the wrong end of a man's uncontrolled anger or being seen as a sexual object.  These threats are real but with the definition of enemy as "something that harms or weakens" I can accept the existence of these threats without allowing them to become my enemy.  The negative emotions or actions of men cannot harm or weaken me if I do not allow them to.  I can approach men prudently being aware of the risks without letting the fear of them grow out of proportion. In trusting that I am capable of detecting the possible presence of threats, I can remain open in situations where none exist.  In this way men are no longer my enemy and the threats that they may present are manageable risks.  Only with trust can real relationships form and fear is the ultimate adverse of trust.  I need to trust my own judgment and in turn be open to trusting the people that I find trustworthy.         

The Nature of Fear

This painting represents fear in its many forms.  How ironic that a symbol of devotion has become a symbol of fear.  My roommate confided in me that whenever she passes Muslims she feels a pang of fear.  She watches the news often and works for an international organization so is constantly exposed to the stories that name Muslims as the source of our ever mounting fear of the outside world.  She fears that the men are glaring and plotting because she is running in shorts.  She pictures them throwing acid on her face.  All images that the news has been feeding us.  I read a definition of fear the other day that really touched the truth of its self justifying nature.  "Fear disables us from taking the focus off ourselves and drives us to function in a dogmatic manner cutting us off from the exterior world that consequently becomes threatening and worrisome.  It forces us to interpret the information we are receiving in a way that justifies, supports and amplifies our feeling of fear.  Without contact with reality, it is impossible to feel empathy."  When we allow fear to control us, we lose the ability to connect with the world around us and remain closed in a dark reality.  We are unable to feel empathy because we are too consumed by our own desire of self preservation.  We feed ourselves more and more information about this source of fear and rationalize our sensation of it.  Our mind reels over images of this false reality and it becomes solidified into our consciousness.  We have successfully convinced ourselves that the threat is real and present without it actually existing in our current surroundings.  Stuck in this dark place, we lose site of the humanness of those around us.  Naming a cause for our fear makes us feel like we can some how control it.  If we can stop this one group of people, we can end this suffering caused by this negative emotion.  But somehow the fear continues through centuries, through generations.  The name of its source changes but the nature of the suffering remains constant.  Putting an end to this one group will not put an end to our fear.  With our vision blurred by this self constructed fear, we cannot see that in the present moment we are safe and well.  We have no reason to fear others.  Without fear we are able to see the needs and those around us and see that they too are struggling with the same dilemma.  Put down the armor that fear has built around you and embrace the love present in the here and now.