In the afternoon I had driven to the mountains, where snow had visited the night before, blanketing the land and in places reducing the roads to a brown, icy slush. After a slow, 12-mile climb, I arrived at my place, the one I adopted after returning to northern New Mexico in mid-October, in time to gasp at the fall show of the Aspens. There, a stream makes its descent, racketing over tiny falls and passing under the road, into the trees and underbrush on the other side that make easy exploration difficult for the uninitiated.
On this day the stream still made itself known, washing the rocks, while everything else lay in 26 degrees of white, and the noise of any jay echoed in the cold, still air. I headed my truck right up to the spot where the stream passes under the road. A few other mid-afternoon explorers had parked facing the rock walk designated for parking. Most had already made the ascent into the trails at Big Tesuque. I simply faced the noisy stream and did the same thing I’ve done each time I’ve made this journey since mid-October. I cried.
Sadness over loss, conflict, loneliness and half-realized attempts to relocate my body and my heart welled up, and I just let the tears go. I tried to practice the breathing exercises I learned earlier in the fall for combating altitude sickness, although if I have suffered these effects, I’m not aware—no headaches, no nausea. Breathe in through the nose slowly counting to four, then exhale through the mouth, counting to eight. More disciplined people can do this for ten minutes. The result, as one might expect, is a calming. The shoulders give up some of their natural tightness. The world doesn’t seem so unrelenting. Pilgrims experienced in meditation know this experience. It is their friend.
My companion on this trip up and down the mountain was Shania Twain. Maybe it seems odd that the finger-snapping sounds of country music’s hip-hop diva, only infrequently lyrical, could be an appropriate companion for a reflective trip into the wilderness. It’s true, though, for me. Pushing, asserting, longing and wise, her music and lyrics tell me it’s going to be all right, not only this afternoon, but tomorrow. That which we long for—call it happiness, peace, or balance, this dream toward which we move in often times wearying lives, begins inside our own private space—body, heart/mind/soul. And ultimately, happiness is real only if shared.
I can thank Sean Penn—whose current film, INTO THE WILD, which tells the true tale of a young graduate of one of America’s best universities—for what his story telling reminded me of last week. Fresh out Emory, and hell-bent on escaping his past—moneyed, conflicted family and the world’s expectations—Christopher McCandless heads to Alaska and his final frontier, touching and being touched by the lives of many pilgrims along the way. At the end of his journey, facing starvation after a winter of much deprivation and weight loss, McCandless is reduced to eating plants, and he makes a mistake, for which he has no antidote. Just that simple, but it’s not so simple. Allegedly his last written words confess what in his young life of privilege he hadn’t been able to realize, that happiness is real only if shared. He gave up everything to search for a truth that the world has known for all recorded time. No man is an island.
A Trip to the Mountains—Santa Fe, New Mexico (December 11, 2007)
R. Harold Hollis
On this day the stream still made itself known, washing the rocks, while everything else lay in 26 degrees of white, and the noise of any jay echoed in the cold, still air. I headed my truck right up to the spot where the stream passes under the road. A few other mid-afternoon explorers had parked facing the rock walk designated for parking. Most had already made the ascent into the trails at Big Tesuque. I simply faced the noisy stream and did the same thing I’ve done each time I’ve made this journey since mid-October. I cried.
Sadness over loss, conflict, loneliness and half-realized attempts to relocate my body and my heart welled up, and I just let the tears go. I tried to practice the breathing exercises I learned earlier in the fall for combating altitude sickness, although if I have suffered these effects, I’m not aware—no headaches, no nausea. Breathe in through the nose slowly counting to four, then exhale through the mouth, counting to eight. More disciplined people can do this for ten minutes. The result, as one might expect, is a calming. The shoulders give up some of their natural tightness. The world doesn’t seem so unrelenting. Pilgrims experienced in meditation know this experience. It is their friend.
My companion on this trip up and down the mountain was Shania Twain. Maybe it seems odd that the finger-snapping sounds of country music’s hip-hop diva, only infrequently lyrical, could be an appropriate companion for a reflective trip into the wilderness. It’s true, though, for me. Pushing, asserting, longing and wise, her music and lyrics tell me it’s going to be all right, not only this afternoon, but tomorrow. That which we long for—call it happiness, peace, or balance, this dream toward which we move in often times wearying lives, begins inside our own private space—body, heart/mind/soul. And ultimately, happiness is real only if shared.
I can thank Sean Penn—whose current film, INTO THE WILD, which tells the true tale of a young graduate of one of America’s best universities—for what his story telling reminded me of last week. Fresh out Emory, and hell-bent on escaping his past—moneyed, conflicted family and the world’s expectations—Christopher McCandless heads to Alaska and his final frontier, touching and being touched by the lives of many pilgrims along the way. At the end of his journey, facing starvation after a winter of much deprivation and weight loss, McCandless is reduced to eating plants, and he makes a mistake, for which he has no antidote. Just that simple, but it’s not so simple. Allegedly his last written words confess what in his young life of privilege he hadn’t been able to realize, that happiness is real only if shared. He gave up everything to search for a truth that the world has known for all recorded time. No man is an island.
A Trip to the Mountains—Santa Fe, New Mexico (December 11, 2007)
R. Harold Hollis
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