Reclaiming, retrieving, meeting

From Friday through Monday morning, I went out of the city and into some wild spaces. The first stop was a place new to me in the Pinaleño Mountains of southeastern AZ, a glorious and almost totally deserted undeveloped site called Snow Flat. The Pinaleño Mountains are an amazing sky island in the middle of very dry uplands. 

Snow Flat on night one was icy cold and completely still. The absolute silence was unnerving when I woke up in the middle of the night. I was the only person camping there.

One of the repeated themes in the story with A was my commitment to take her to tall trees at least a couple times a year. It's a setting she is recharged and inspired by, and it provides an antidote to the desert for her. She doesn't really share my love for the desert-- or the ocean, for that matter. She's much more of a high mountain, lake and tall tree person. So, in exchange for trips to drylands, I'd always try to get us up high. Another theme in the story is the many, many camping trips we took during our 5 years together-- Mogollon Rim, Arches, Santa Fe, a two week trip down the entire Baja peninsula and back in July (!) with a ton of camping, Vail, Zion, Organ Pipe Cactus National Monument, Bahía Kino in Sonora, Prescott, Flagstaff-- so many trips.

One of the ways I grieve is to go right into experiences that are important to me that used to be experiences shared with the departed other. Sometimes I have to wait, because the emotional associations and the sharp pain of missing the other person in a shared context feels like it will be too much. Other times, especially when the experiences are absolutely vital to my wellness, I gather my courage and just go right in.

My experience of all sorts of wild settings with nothing but a tent and a few other things is so vitally, crucially and indispensably important to me that I decided to do my usual spring travels, no matter the resonances and reminders.

It was a very mixed and challenging trip. The experience of unspeakable sadness at missing someone in the midst of deep solitude and vast beauty. The experience of beginning to reconnect with myself and get some ground under my feet. Reading No Self, No Problem and Dropping Ashes on the Buddha, meditating, yet still unable to rein in intense mental turmoil, suffering and attachment. Yet also getting glimpses of peace, ease and loving kindness. No distractions. Right up against everything I was experiencing in a completely unmediated way.

Anger was a huge part of what I encountered in myself, ridiculously searing in the midst of such a peaceful and empty place. I'd look at tall trees and recall, for example, that A's cover photo on Facebook is of the mountains outside Seattle, where she went with her new person in February. My paranoia rises up, thinking she intentionally put that public photo up in order to wound me, since I tried to take her to similar places and we shared a lot of times in places like that. Only the Cascades of course are better, better than the mountains we went to, etc. Agony of barbed wire thoughts. Heightened at times by the fact that I had hoped we would travel to these places together-- places I was excited to show her.

My mind refused to quiet, much of the time. I continue to have also actual physical feelings of a stabbing pain in my heart, the actual physical location of where grief and loss shows up in my body. Or an alarming anxiety, emerging from nowhere, rooted in the fear of being destroyed, immolated, obliterated by my own feelings, that shows up in my guts and has a twisting feeling.

On the other hand, there were moments of grace and freedom, thankfully. Moments where I truly started to feel free of all of it, and know I was capable of facing down all of it, "going through" it (as our metaphor says) and reclaiming a vital experience for myself, without the searing attachment to another person who is completely gone, but also without forcing it, going into aversion, pushing away or whistling in the dark.

This is the value of the journey to the underworld: in shadow and fear, we reclaim and retrieve what we've temporarily lost, or we realize it will never be retrieved and we let go, let go, let go. Stick a fork in it. Acceptance of the finality of death and the constancy of impermanence. Realizing that we can stand right in the middle of it and not be destroyed. Or that, even if we are destroyed, we aren't destroyed.

On Saturday, I left Snow Flat for a quick visit to some plants I wanted to see in the Big Lue Mountains on the AZ/NM border.

I traveled to the Gila Wilderness outside Silver City and spent the night rolling in the tent under the tall trees in the midst of a strong wind storm. There is nothing like the rushing, soughing, roaring sound of wind in Ponderosa pines. It's like being inside a waterfall roaring off a cliff. It felt appropriate and fitting, a big bold and wild mirror.

The next day, I went to Silver City briefly, then to the Continental Divide Trail at highway 90 in NM, hiked a few miles out and back, ate lunch sitting on a rock.

Then to a forlorn old mining site southwest of Lordsburg called Granite Gap.

The original plan was to then head back to Phoenix. But I was drawn powerfully back to the Pinaleños, especially as I traveled up 191 and saw them from the road.

So back up I went, to 9000 feet. Once again, Snow Flat was deserted. This time, I hiked down the small stream and discovered that the short trail opened out to a vast canyon with heart rending views.

This was tough in some ways because I knew A's son would have loved it. It was an easy hike, but with enough difficulty and mystery for an 8 year old, and the opening to the canyon was so sudden. I sent up a prayer for A's son, for his continued wellness and great adventures in his life. I still haven't been granted permission to spend any time with him, which I am expecting means that A thinks it best that I just don't spend time with him at all. I think, if this is her decision, it's a shitty decision-- but she's the boy's mother, and it is completely out of my hands. I have been tempted occasionally to contact his father and try to get some time with him that way, but then I realize this is not really about him so much as about me trying to manage and control a situation which is unmanageable and not in my control. It feels more sane to just put A's son in the hands of the universe, so to speak, and not take any action or make any sudden moves. I only hope he is at peace with my sudden disappearance and that he doesn't have any abandonment stuff that he carries forward.

In meditation in these wild places, I got a deep and abiding sense of the roles I had been playing. Anam Thubten writes at length about the chasm between our true nature, our true Self, and the roles we play, the stories we tell and our attachment to those roles and stories. The grief, despair, pain, loneliness and anger are as real as anything else, but this trip out in order to meet something and be sure it is retrieved and reclaimed reminded me that I lost "only" the roles and the story. That what is true and reliable can't be lost. No matter how obscured by ego, narrative, attachment and forgetting, our true nature begins to come back and trust us again, especially through meditation.

A woman here in the Valley with 40 years of sobriety talks about the mountain and the weather. Rain, snow, wind, fire, flood-- it's just weather. The mountain is always just the mountain.