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.