Bodies Unbound

MOUNTAINS OF MIND

CHAPTER 7.

I have stopped writing for two months. What happened? I got lazy. I got scared. It happened at the cabin. I got to that place that can’t be put into words. I got to that place I believe is not acceptable, that I am not sure is sane. Some resentment began to chase around my brain. Then my whole life began to crumble.

I tried to get off caffeine. I tried to push myself into more and more exercise, and then it was me doing it all again. Me chasing God again. Me thinking that if I could only do it right my life would be perfect, I would be perfect – and then I was dead in the water – AGAIN. Then I became unfaithful to both the writer and the would-be mystic.

I had one interesting thought at the cabin. One night I was going to play computer games and read my novel. I wanted to do nothing but eat. I then had the thought, “If you are going to write tomorrow about what you are doing today, what would be interesting to write about?” It stopped me in my tracks. How do I live my life today so I can write something interesting tomorrow?

I put on wonderful, soulful, sexy music and did every yoga pose I knew for an hour and a half. I slept like a baby. I did yoga every night I was there for the rest of the time. Straining to get a strong body back, straining to hold a pose was delicious. Each day I got better. I even went up onto the rocky cliff where I used to do yoga as a young woman, balancing on one leg over a 300 foot drop. It concentrates the mind.

The last full day at the cabin I packed a few things in my knap sack and headed for my favorite place on earth. It is a steep hike out into the wilderness where I grew up as a child. Along the way I prayed to the land. Nature has a language. When I first enter the wilderness I coax her as I walk. I whisper along the paths, “bring me your bones and your feathers.” From the rocks in the mountains I call loudly, “Bring me your bones and your feathers.” It takes time for the land to respond. The land watches you. It reads your footprints. You must travel a path over and over before it knows your name. This land knows my name. I have been walking her path ways for over fifty years.

When the land knows you it brings you dead butterflies and mice and watches you. How will you respond to its creatures? I always bury them with reverence, marking their graves with the feathers of crow, woodpecker or sparrow. Always let whatever is caught or stuck, free. Then the wild begins to give you its gifts. Soon the trees lend you their strength when you are on a steep path, and the stream offers you its purity. Soon you find the bones, whitened by the sun. I have made jewelry of these bones and worn them around my neck. I have placed bones on my altar, used feathers in my hair. At times I am offered whole nests.

People have said to me, “How do you find these things? I never find anything.”

I told one friend who was visiting and truly wanted to know, “I don’t ever look. I ask. I ask for what I want over and over then one day, walking down a path I hear a bone saying, ‘Over here. I’m right here.’”

I invited him to try it.

He asked for an owl. As he walked around the bend of the path, there on the ground was a piece of wood exactly in the shape of an owl. Later he found an owl in the road. He took some feathers. Through this I learned you may skip the long days of waiting if you can find someone to introduce you to the land.

The place I was heading was a gorge where the river pounds fiercely through the rocks. On the way to that place, the dogs tried over and over to convince me that we were too far from home. It is a steep climb on narrow Sierra trails. The dogs got hot and thirsty but were afraid of the loud water.

There were so many memories on that trail. My mother and I used to trailer my horse, Star, for our summer vacations there. The Packers who took people and their belongings up to high country allowed me to come along for the day. At age eight I awoke before dawn to eat breakfast with the cowboys. Then we mounted our horses, and with a mule train trailing behind us, we rode the back-country. I remember the mist coming up from the meadows before the sun rose. By ten o’clock the trails were hot, dusty places. Once we came upon a woman wearing shorts and a bikini top. The old cowboy I was riding with named Bishop turned to me, and in astonishment said, “Why, she didn’t have enough on to dust a fiddle.”

Hiking with my dogs, I passed the place where, ten years ago, I met a hysterical woman on the trail. Her husband had fallen into the river and she had been running along its bank trying to find him for hours. People had gone for help but no one stayed with her. I sat with her for a long time waiting for the rescue team to make it up that trail with donkeys, wetsuits, ropes and diving gear. They found him trapped under a ledge beneath the water. I held the woman as she got the news. I gave her my body as she keened. It was an important meeting for me as well. I had gone to my favorite spot to meditate on whether I should have the operation that would keep me in my body. The physical problems in my body offered me a way out of this world of sorrows. The woman proved to me that I was a valuable person, whether I had a uterus or not. Because of that meeting I decided to have the surgery.

I continued walking up the trail. When I stopped at a small stream to drink or a shady rock to rest I wrote every resentment, every thing I was angry about, every fear.

Four hours later I came to the place with the thundering water. I sat beneath a pine tree and read those statements and asked how to rid myself of these negative emotions. From all I knew, read, and experienced I knew there was a place where the negative did not live. What I longed to know was how to reach that place consciously? I felt my body and mind alive with resentments. I tried not to think any thought that would fuel them, just feel them as sensation. Without thought, the sensations were bearable. Then I had a sense of that blank field, out of which all thought emerges – was that the One Mind? Did all creation come out of this place? I sat in awe at what ever I was in touch with. All I knew for sure was there was a deep, inner stillness inside me.

In time I went down stream to a quiet pool and took off my clothes and got in the water and prayed. If you have not prayed in icy water you have not prayed. You get to the point quickly with great enthusiasm. The cold reaches into the tiniest crevices of you and finds every prayer. It is like the heat of the sweat lodge. The extremes get you past complacent places. You scream out your woes and desires with all your heart. It breaks through to the other side, that intense, raw, cold. I stayed emerged until my body leapt out of that water by itself.

I lay on the warm granite frozen but thawing. I sobbed from the inside. The emptiness inside me contracted towards itself for a long time. The dogs sniffed at me concerned.

When I was still I began to think of Wyn, my friends with problems, the world at war and I knew I had to go in again. I went in for my family, and all creatures. We are one.

The next day I packed my belongings from the cabin and left. When I got to a place my phone would work I called Sacha to see if I could stay the night with her. She is a friend who lives in the Alabama Hills outside Lone Pine. “Come on.” She said.

I arrived in the late afternoon. I stared into her brilliant blue eyes and burst into tears. I was so happy to see her. She made me dinner and we talked and talked about Spirit, and our path towards letting go of the human dilemma, aligning ourselves with Truth, our eternal beings, and of course our neurosis. Sacha was the perfect half way house. She lives between the two worlds. She understands everything.

She has a cabin out back that llamas come to meditate in and Buddhist teachers spend long periods of silence in. She rents it out for silent retreats for months at a time. Sacha shops and cares for them and holds retreats of her own. Her life is one large retreat.

I went to bed in the cabin that all those holy people had spent months meditating in, knowing I was going home the next day to much chaos. On the back porch of the cabin I prayed. I felt so grateful to be there. I had made it through ten days – alone. I had met my loneliness, I had met the mystic within. How would I walk with Her back home?  The dark, starry night of the desert, and the awe inspiring rocks of the Alabama Hills seemed to be listening. I was connected to the land, and the soft warm night air. It seemed to tell me that I would loose the mystic in me, and find Her, a thousand times or more and that was just fine. “Just walk your path,” said the night air. “Just Love,” said the leaves of the near-by cottonwoods. “Just be,” said the rocks, standing like statues forever over- looking the valley,