Climbing A Mountain Part 6: Leave No Trace

Leave No Trace

A wilderness mantra, it means pack out what you pack in. Including your own waste.

Fun stuff.

The Forest Service provides human waste pack-out bags. One large ziplock bag contains a paper target (think X marks the spot), a brown paper lunch bag containing a small scoop of kitty litter, another brown paper bag, and two (seriously?) squares of toilet paper. The directions are pretty straight forward. Find as much privacy as you can, lay the target on the ground, take aim, and hope you are a good shot. Drop your business into kitty litter bag. Insert kitty litter bag into paper bag. Tuck everything inside the zip lock bag. Take it with you.

Like I said. Fun stuff.

Now multiply that by 8 people and 2 1/2 days.

Everyone’s used bags went into a kitchen size garbage bag. If we’d thought better of it, we would have stowed our own stash somewhere and schlepped it out ourselves. But we didn’t, and digging into that ripening garbage bag to separate out a few for everyone to carry seemed like a very, very, very bad idea. One of our gang offered to take one for the team and carry the bag out.

He deserves a special place in heaven.

We tied the very heavy garbage bag to the outside of his pack, and prayed to the mountain gods that the bag wouldn’t split. A few steps down the trail I remembered the cotton pillow case in my pack. We put the garbage bag inside the pillow case, increasing the chances of the contents staying put.

There was an additional bag of garbage containing the rest of the trash accumulated over the course of our time on the mountain to be dealt with. Someone else volunteered to carry that bag out.

He deserves an almost-as-special place in heaven too.

Heading down the hill, every step the two guys who deserve special places in heaven took was made harder because of the additional weight. Because they were carrying what was not really theirs to carry. It was a visual reminder of something I already think about a lot. We are responsible for dealing with our own shit. For taking care of our own garbage. When we don’t, other people have to deal with it, like it or not.

We are born into the families and circumstances we are, shaping us into the humans we become. No one is exempt from the impacts—good, bad, and sometimes ugly—of those who raise us. We may not be responsible for all that happened to us. However, as we grow up and mature, we are accountable for what we do with what we’ve experienced and who we have become as a result.

This work of becoming healthy, whole-hearted humans isn’t for the faint of heart. It’s hard work, but it’s also good work. Some of the most important we will ever do. I know that because I’m still at it, and hopefully will be until I take my leave. The more work I do, the less I leave behind for others to have to carry.

It wasn’t lost on me that the pillow case carrying that garbage bag wasn’t just any pillow case. It was a gift from my daughters when they were little, with pictures of them on both sides. Whatever we leave unaddressed has a lasting impact. It becomes a burden carried by those around us. Usually those we love the most.

Leave No Trace



A New Start To The Day

The news ain’t great these days.

Most mornings as I wait the recommended four minutes before I can press the coffee, I scan my email inbox. Along with the tantalizing smell of freshly ground coffee brewing, my senses are assaulted with the latest New York Times Breaking News Headlines. While there is the very occasional headline that to my heart constitutes good news—the swearing in of Judge Katanji Brown Jackson—most of the time what I read breaks my heart a little more—the past two weeks have almost put me under—and hope is hard to find.

It’s not a great way to start the day.

So, I changed it.

I unsubscribed to The NY Times newsletter.

I subscribed to Rosemerry Wahtola Trommer’s A Hundred Falling Veils: there’s a poem in every day

This morning I was greeted with my first poem from Rosemerry, about, of all things, hope. (You can find her poem, Longing to Be Seen here)

How we start the day matters. Along with coffee and time with my husband and our dog as the sunlight first hits the meadow, I’m choosing to start my day with poetry, and a little hope.

Maybe you will too.

(Now before you go jumping to any conclusions, it’s not that I don’t want to be informed about the goings on in the world. I am simply choosing not to start my day there. Being part of a well informed citizenry matters to me, and it should matter to you too. Our democracy depends on it. There are good sources of news, as in real information as opposed to opinion and rhetoric out there, and, spoiler alert, they are not found on social media.)




We Are The Mountain

For us humans, emotions are a tricky thing. They can come and go in the blink of an eye, drop in without notice and drop out just as quickly, or decide to settle in and stay for a spell. Most of us relish what we deem the good emotions, and resist having to endure the ones we’ve come to see as bad or negative. The ones that don’t, well, feel good.

I’ve always been a feeling kind of girl. Emotions, even big, hard, painful ones don’t scare me. However, they can snag me, and before I know it, I’m wrapped around some kind of axle and in full reactive mode. It’s like I am the emotion, rather than me experiencing that emotion. It can be exhausting. For me, and for the people I share life with.

This morning, as most mornings, we sit on the front porch, coffee cups in hand, and read the daily offering of Fr. Richard Rohr, founder of the Center for Action and Contemplation (CAC) in Albuquerque, New Mexico.

His focus this week is Wisdom.

CAC faculty member, Cynthia Bourgeault, suggests that, “Wisdom is not knowing more, but knowing with more of you, knowing deeper.”

To help us dig deeper into wisdom, what it is, and how to grow more of it, Fr. Rohr created a list of 7 pathways, or ways of knowing, that can help us along our own wisdom way.

One of those pathways is emotion.

“Emotion: Great emotions are especially powerful teachers. Love, ecstasy, hatred, jealousy, fear, despair, anguish: each have their lessons. Even anger and rage are great teachers, if we listen to them. They have so much power to reveal our deepest self to ourselves and to others, yet we tend to consider them negatively. I would guess that people die and live much more for emotional knowing than they ever will for intellectual, rational knowing. To taste these emotions is to live in a new reality afterward, with a new ability to connect.”.

As we sat reflecting on our emotions as a way of knowing with more of ourselves, the changing light hitting Mt. Adams seemed to underscore what we had just read.

We are the mountain.

Emotion is our teacher.

Forging A New Path

Our bodies can teach us so much.

For the past few months I’ve been experiencing some bothersome pain in my hip that radiates down to my knee. Nightime is the worst, the pain often waking me up in the middle of the night. It isn’t excruciating, but noticeable enough to interrupt an otherwise good night of sleep, and make itself known throughout the day. I have been wondering if I’ll just have to learn to live with it.

Enter Dr. Erica Figge.

Erica is a dear friend who also just happens to be a world-class athlete, strength and conditioning coach, and chiropractor. This morning as we caught up over a virtual cup of coffee I was lamenting about this low-grade but constant pain. “Tell me more” she said.

Before long we were both down on our yoga mats, practicing a movement that might alleviate the pain. Mine has a typical pain referral pattern, and the longer I allow it to go on, the deeper the pain-message pathway in my brain. Thankfully, it is possible to create a new pathway by engaging my body in a way meant to address the source of the pain. The possibility of an uninterrupted night of sleep and a more pain-free experience was all the incentive I needed to commit to getting down on my yoga mat several times a day and see what my body, brain, and I could accomplish together.

What is true of the body is true of the heart and soul. The longer we live with the pain of past injuries and wounds, the more deeply etched those painful message pathways in our brain become. Unaddressed, we grow so accustomed to the pain that we begin to believe we have no choice but to live with it. Today, my body, along with the help of a good and knowledgeable friend, reminded me that we don’t. We are blessed with a brain that can rewire itself. It is willing to develop new, better, and more life affirming pathways, if we are willing to take the time, put in the work, and engage good help.

During this current life-altering time, we have been forced to come face-to-face with ourselves and those we share life with. Old injuries are more evident. We’ve nowhere to run, and it becomes increasingly hard to hide from what hurts. The pain of one injury can begin to refer far beyond the source, inflicting further harm to ourselves and those around us.

In the strange ways in which only struggle and hardship can, this time of being held captive offers us a chance to take ourselves and our own hurts on. Once this time of isolation and quarantine is over there will be more to distract us from ourselves, and the inner work that is ours to do could easily get lost in the shuffle of life on the other side.

The longer we wait the harder it becomes to overcome our old stories of pain and suffering.

But.

If we are willing to take the time, put in the work, and engage good help, our brains are ready and willing to create new pathways. Ones that lead to lives of greater authenticity, wholeness, and wellbeing.

Let’s get to work.

(Note: If you live in California and are ready to take the next step in your health and wellness journey, contact Figge Chiropractic)

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The Whole Picture

I’ve worn bifocals for years. They allow me to see both near and far, read, and safely drive a car. Without my dual lenses life would become a bit one-dimensional.

The state in which we find ourselves today, where the racism upon which this country was built and continues to be sustained, has been laid bare. The needs that must be addressed have been brought into sharp focus, and we must not look away. It is difficult to view life through any other lens.

The danger in only seeing the world through a single lens is that we become one-dimensional people.

Lately, whenever I turn my attention elsewhere, away from the shame of our racist past and my part in it, the pain of our racist present, and the threat of a continuing racist future, I feel a little guilty. Like I am being shallow or selfish for finding moments of hilarity, causes for joy, or the simple pleasures found in a good novel, good food, good wine, or a hike in the woods. How can I allow myself to feel good when there is so much bad to be reckoned with?

I let myself feel good because I must.

We all must.

We must stay connected to our innate goodness in order to oppose that which is bad.

We must laugh every chance we get because a merry heart does good like a medicine. And when it comes to the virus of racism, we are all called to be healers. Especially if we are white.

We must find causes for joy so that we can address the issues that are causing such deep sorrow.

We must delight in simple pleasures lest we give up because it is simply too hard.

We must never lose sight of the whole picture.

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Drinking Our Own Kool-Aid

According to some research, over 80% of our thoughts are negative, and most of those thoughts are on a continuous loop, returning to us again and again. The problem with our negative thoughts and stories is that we believe them, and the more we listen to these habitual stories, the more familiar, and in an odd way, comforting, they can become.

They are our stories, and we are sticking to them.

But.

Do we have to?

Short answer: No.

Longer answer: No, but it’s hard work giving them up.

If you’re like me, you are familiar with the stories that hold you captive, and recognizing them is our first step to letting them go. We need to cut ourselves a little slack if it takes some time to develop new ones, and we might need some professional help along the way. If so, let’s get it. It will be some of the best money we’ve ever spent.

Believing our stories that have been with us for God-knows-how-long is a little like drinking our own Kool-Aid. We don’t stop to consider that there might be better ways to quench our inner thirst.

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Photo by Magda Ehlers from Pexels

Test Results

I had some blood drawn the other day at the request of one of my doctors to check in on the levels of a few key hormones. The test results are in and once my doc has had a chance to review them, we will discuss whether we need to make any tweaks int treatment in the name of staying healthy and energized.

Lately I’ve noticed too much fluctuation in mood and outlook to ignore, which has me wondering if there are some key components that have dropped below optimal levels. I know what the vital ingredients are to keep me healthy and engaged with life, and after a quick review of my essential elements, it is clear that a few are in need of tweaking.

When things don’t seem quite right, it’s time to test our levels of that which keeps us at our best.

Photo: Chokniti Khongchum on pixels.com

Photo: Chokniti Khongchum on pixels.com

Milestones

“I’m going to say three words, and I want you to remember them.”

Chair

Lemon

Sunrise

Yesterday I had what is called a Medicare Wellness Exam. We covered all the basics of a normal exam, with the addition of a few new twists now that I am old enough to be a card carrying Medicare recipient. Like remembering those three words, which the PA asked me to recall and repeat several times throughout the visit.

That exam was a milestone event even if no one said so. It was a stark reminder that I’m on the far side of youth, and that my final horizon here on this planet is getting closer every day.

Milestones aren’t reserved for those of us with at least 65 trips around the sun. They belong to the forty-something with their first pair of readers, new parents with someone other than themselves to care for, a high school graduate paying their first month’s rent, a recent retiree with time to spare, or a child wobbling off on a bicycle without the steadying hand of a parent.

We are all heading in the same direction, and there’s no turning back.

Every milestone is a reminder to be all-in, and if we aren’t, then today is the day to start.

(And yes, I still remember them.)

Chair

Lemon

Sunrise

Photo by erdinç ersoy from Pexels

Photo by erdinç ersoy from Pexels

A Buffer

A buffer serves as a shield or defense. It is a protective barrier that prevents contact between things. There are times when we are called to serve as a buffer for others. To protect them from the raging storm that threatens to overwhelm and overtake them.

And.

There are times when, as difficult as it is, we are called to move out of the way and let things collide in order for a reckoning with what is to occur. This is true everywhere. Whether talking about the workplace, financial realities, a family, a friendship, a marriage, an athletic team, or a corner office on the C-Suite, change and transformation can’t occur without rubbing directly up against the truth.

Serving as a buffer is an act of love.

So is stepping aside.

Photo from pexels.com

Photo from pexels.com

Word Of The Day: CONNECTED

Over the next few weeks I will be focusing on a word of the day drawn from a list created at the beginning of January. Each word was chosen to serve as a guide to inspire and inform my steps through 2020. If you are just joining me now and want to look in on earlier posts on this topic, you will find links to each at the end.

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According to the New Oxford English Dictionary, a connection is the action of linking one thing to another. If that is so, then it seems first and foremost that it is important to know what to attach to what. Especially when it comes to crafting a meaningful life.

When launching my business, it took me awhile to come up with a concise statement that would capture both the philosophy behind, as well as the purpose of, my work as a writer, speaker, and coach. It also needed to be the guiding philosophy behind how I endeavor to live my own life. See if what I came up with connects for you like it did for me.

Connect who you are with how you live.