...Been A Little Lost

So........................ what possibly could I have that's worth saying?

Waking up in a pall of fire smoke tilts the world just a bit. Sure, it’s still the one you fell asleep in, but it’s also different, familiar and yet a bit off, all in the same moment. Still beautiful but disquieting.

Been a little lost.

Not enough to worry, but enough to quiet up and listen. Really look around. Pay better attention.

I see this as a good thing. Like a gift, really.

It’s not unlike looking up into the night sky from some lonely spot in Patagonia or New Zealand after a lifetime of North American gazings. Same moon. Different stars.

That kind of lost.

True story: when I was young I sometimes feared I might lose my soul. I’d seen others do it; become someone they loathed, were ashamed of, could no longer trust. When you’re young you don’t really understand how such a thing can happen, only very reluctantly that it can happen. I’m pretty sure a lot of my friends never experienced such worries. I envied them, that. Their lives seemed simpler. Some said I worried too much. I probably did. Was always aware of that gradual slope just off the trail that quickly steepened into an abyss. People I loved and counted on had gone there. Slipped. Fallen. Failed themselves and those who loved them. Some never got back up. Watching that can change a person. Witnessing that fading, that change in their eyes… that moment when they realize that they are broken and hollowed out, that hatred or stubbornness have destroyed them. Then they get mean. At least some of them.

Slowly though, after navigating, demurring, surviving invitation after temptation, after altercation, after running that gauntlet enough times, I noticed I didn’t worry so much that I might break, didn’t continually wonder if I’d become one of those who cave or sell my soul for fifteen minutes of fame or ‘thirty pieces of silver.’ Life might beat me down (it can do that to almost anyone), but I came to trust that I wouldn’t beat myself.

Sounds weird to say that rock climbing helped with that. Late high school through early fatherhood. Weirder yet because I was never particularly masterful at it. But I loved it and there were these moments; that slow dawning, somewhat euphoric, realization that it only takes a wee bit of energy to safely hold your position on a protruding nub upon a rock face, that squeezing the rock even one bit harder, gripping with every bit of one’s fearful energy simply exhausts you and does absolutely nothing to change the forces of gravity or the rock. One learns intimately how much fear costs energetically by going broke, again and again. Sewing machine legs. Hand cramps. Panicky choices. Sad, unnecessary little falls. Big falls too. Thank god for ropes and someone on the other end to catch you.

Less fear means more energy for other, better things. Pretty simple.

A proper rope, a trustworthy belay partner and a hundred foot stretch of impossible looking rock face can teach you a great deal about fear and about breaking down impossible seeming tasks into a series of calmly considered moves. Quite a thing to test and prove to yourself in the space of an afternoon.

Eventually, feeling a little lost didn’t have that same accompanying, overpowering element of fear any more. Save your energy, spend it wisely, doling it out only as needed to maintain balance, to keep from falling. Anything more is wasted. Save that energy for a big move, something wonderful, something useful. So I took what I learned as a mediocre climber and applied it to things I was inherently better at, things I really, really wanted to become excellent at.

Might sound a bit woo-woo or saccharine sweet and silly, but it wasn’t. Well, at least it didn’t feel silly to me.

Don’t get me wrong. I still get all balled up with fear, sometimes. But now, well into my sixties I’ve learned better how to make it my teacher. Sometimes even my friend.

“You’re feeling a bit unsettled, you sense a disturbance in the ‘Force’ around you. What if, instead of tensing up and embracing a state of ‘barely holding my shit together’ or outright fear you calmly redirected that energy, became more ‘curious’, instead? More observant.

“Deep breaths, Davey. Now what’s really going on here?”

Learning to do that dropped me more and more often into a place of calm determination to gather the available clues, watch the undulations around me, listen more carefully and go ahead and ask all those questions of the world that my heart was asking of me.

“What am I supposed to be noticing here?” is a wildly different paradigm to work from than “Poor me! Why me?”

Adventurer versus victim. Empowered versus loser.

It can help sometimes to stack a few stones atop one another, build a cairn, a place to pause deliberately, to put down a marker beside the trail, something to look back toward as you step forward into hazy uncertainty.

One of the ways I do this is to make pictures; deliberate, aesthetically framed observations, a kind of meditation, a journal. I listen to birdsongs. Pick up rocks whose energy speaks (or sometimes merely whispers). I sniff the wind, take off my shoes, bury my feet in the sand or wade in the muddy shallows. I swim in the river’s big eddys, taste the fruits hanging from nearby branches, crush leaves and breathe in their scents. I drop to my hands and knees, lift up the bedspread and say “Boo” to the monster that it turns out isn’t actually hiding there under there under the bed after all.

Sometimes I deliberately drift off into sleep for at least the length of a nap in a new place to allow my ‘beneath consciousness’ to converse with the area’s energetic realms, unseen. You wouldn’t believe how profoundly a short nap in a place can change your sense of it.

I’ve learned to go back in memory to one of the last places I remember feeling fully present upon the trail.

I felt very much ‘found’ and on the path after days, deep in a canyon, observing, listening, conversing with non-human people. So I scroll back, sniff the air of memory, try to piece together a sense of that more centered moment in time…

These two muleys. I’d had a pretty good conversation with the big one the day before and we’d parted on good terms. Next evening, he and his much smaller fork-horned friend popped up out of the brush and crossed the gravel just in front of me, maybe a half mile downriver from camp. I talked to them and they stopped to listen. Definitely wasn’t feeling lost that evening.

And so… unable thus far to shake this sense of imbalance and vertigo, I find myself doing a bit of backward looking in hopes of ferreting out just where I lost the trail.

5 moments, stacked: (above). Yes, I was definitely in a ‘found’ state while watching this female Belted Kingfisher dive for her breakfast while walking along the river in early morning light. And again, when each evening a family of wild turkeys came wandering through camp.

At first, of course they were surprised to see me there and quite fearful. But after our first encounter when they had to move very cautiously past me at a distance of maybe ten feet with the river just behind them and several, still-flightless chicks…

…when nothing bad happened, they seemed to sense that nothing bad was going to happen, that I meant them no harm. Somehow they came to trust their sense of that and so, each day they grew just a bit bolder in my company. By the fifth day they no longer made any effort to hide when they paraded past and no longer discouraged the little ones from playing as they did.

Definitely wasn’t feeling lost at that point, either.

So, obviously I haven’t got it all sorted out just yet. And that’s ok. There’s still a bit of swirl and a bit of strange mixed in with what’s familiar.

Change on the near horizon is my guess. Most of us feel it before we can see it.

Same moon. Different stars.

That kind of lost.

Finding grace within the swirl is ever so much more important than running from it.

That’s all I’ve got for now. But more in time, I’m almost certain.

She was one of the wranglers on the mule train that packed in supplies to the Granite Park Chalet in the back country of Glacier National Park, where we stayed for a couple of nights a few weeks back. They pack in essential supplies this way twice a week. When this young, stubborn-ish mule decided to act out, she remained cool and steady, never once letting him get the upper hand. He was persistent, but so was she. T’was a thing of beauty to behold.

Buck up kid. You’ve got this.

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