Bridges.

Striving: I have been thinking a lot about climbing…

"I am seeking. I am striving. I am in it with all of my heart." - Van Gogh

Here is the story of my life: 

I am ten months old. I have just learned to walk. I am climbing out of my crib. My mother is sleeping outside of my bedroom door. The door is closed. There is a Christmas tree with twinkle lights on it next to my bed. 

I am two years old. I am climbing trees. I am fond of eating rocks. There are no pictures. I have two brothers I boss around the living room. 

I am five years old. I am holding a rake. I am raking leaves on a forest path. My parents find me and ask what I'm doing to which I respond: "I'm raking all the leaves in the forest."

I am seven years old. I am constructing the perfect tree-house. I am planning to make a bridge between the two olive trees and the fig tree, or at least a zip-line. 

I am nine years old. I live in a villa with a view of a volcano. Every morning I am out on this deck to feed my pet rabbit and smell the ashes that have fallen overnight. 

I am twelve years old. I have won the Naval Base Talent Show. I played and sang the Battle Hymn of the Republic. I am also first chair trumpet in my band. I have read every Nancy Drew book there ever was. 

I am thirteen years old. I am in Costa Rica with three-hundred teenage girls I have never met. A group of girls who are older than me have covered my room in toilet paper. 

I am sixteen years old. I am kissed for the first time. I go to Prom. I cry in corners so much. I get up early to do my hair every morning. 

I am twenty years old. I am in Oxford. I am sprinting through Christ Church Gardens before sunrise to the Rowing Houses on the Isis. I don't buy anything I don't need for a year. 

I am twenty-two years old. I decide that hospitals are cold and dark places. I start a gym with a friend. I make a lot of mistakes. I make a home for a lot of people. Eventually, it's just me. 

I was born to hope. I was born to claw at meaning. I was born to ambition. I was born to seek a summit state of being.

Shortly before leaving for this journey (I am now nearing the "end" of) I had a conversation with a friend. In our general community (world?!) it is unheard of that a person would not have an objective on any given day, no plan, no great imminent hope for the near future, no mountain to aim at on the horizon. 

"You always want us to be learning and improving - there is always some point we should be working toward," she said.

And I actually felt her declaration thud into the air between us. Was she right? Had I been saying this? Wanting this? Did I give this to others? 

Another time I was right in the middle of teaching a class to do pull-ups when a question was blurted out: "How is a pull-up functional for life?" I realized after thinking about this that this too was something I had never thought of as being foundational to everyday life.

As an infant my mother had to sleep outside my crib for a while because I loved to climb. I walked at ten months old, and set my sights on something higher than this thereafter. 

I was obsessed with tree-houses in grade school: making them, being in them, learning about them, and imagining how I might coddle together the scraps of that time to make something beyond my dreams. 

Things went much the same as I got older. There has always been something to win, something to better, something to feel, something to do to my utmost… before walking to something higher to achieve. I have filled my days with the sound of steps. 

To climb is human. 

To pull ourselves up is human. 

To seek higher ground is human. 

But we can also live so entrenched in our own lives and the story of our bound selves that we may ask one day, offhandedly, "How is a pull-up functional?" 

Have we forgot that we were made for higher places? 

Here is the rub though: where - exactly - is the end? What - exactly - is to be found at the heights? What - really - is it like to be in the place where we are aiming? Who - exactly - are we leaving behind? Taking with us? 

Is my ladder leaning against the right wall? 

The other day I had the pleasure of tackling one of the most mentally-challenging hikes of my life. Risk-wise, elevation-wise, time-wise, this hike was an exercise in ambition and striving. Dents-du-Midi ("teeth of noon") is a many-summited mountain located in the Chablais Alps of Switzerland. The highest peak is Le Haute Cime ("the high summit") which beckons from 10,696ft. or 3,257m.  It was first ascended in 1784 by one Jean-Maurice Clement, a man who may well have completed the climb just as I did, i.e. with little to no idea of what he was getting into at all. 

Upon reaching the view that I *thought* was the top, the rest of the crew wanted to climb to the final peak a couple 100ft. up. I wanted to take a nap - so I did. So why do I still feel that I missed out on something great even after telling myself that that first summit was more than "sufficient"? 

There is a confusing paradox at work here. In mindfulness practice there is generally this idea that anytime you are reaching or striving towards a mode of being in meditation this takes you out of the allotted time to being in the present. However the future is what pushes us to appreciate the present. We look ahead to death - to the death of anything and anytime - and we are driven to grasp at the present. We even look behind us at the past and remorsefully burden ourselves by those memories to appreciate what is "now". So - this is the interplay: we sit between two poles, trying to balance on an axis of being. 

But - as I have heard in my travels, "Balance is bull-shit. There is only integration." We are never done with the climb. The moment can never really stand alone. Our lives are less like lines and more like circles. This is the way of the world. This is a way of being. Around and around we go. The summit is only ever a stop along the way. How much of what we believe is kept high on the summit, has been with us all along? 

I live my life in widening circles

that reach out across the world

I am may not complete this one

but I give myself to it. 

I circle around God, around the ancient* tower. 

I've been circling for thousands of years

and I still don't know: 

am I a falcon, a storm, or a great song? 

-Rainier Marie Rilke

*translation here my own from Arrus, who has been reading Rilke with me in German. 

Courage.

"Only to the extent that we expose ourselves over and over to annihilation can that which is indestructible be found in us." - Pema Chondron

I met a Girl named Courage

She is not large

But spritely

Hair every which way

Held up by her spirit.

She is not loud

But appears

"I am Courage,

I am 5 years old."

She is not alone

But trails a sibling

Gripping her leg,

Peering from behind her.

She is not proud

But pink.

Heart fluttering. 

Smile bustling.

She is not aware

But sure - 

That we are here.

That this is a good day to be alive.

She is not a picture

But the realest real

Like the itch of a sweater 

Like all the possibilities the world can hold.

Resonate.

res·o·nate

ˈreznˌāt/

verb

1. 1.

   produce or be filled with a deep, full, reverberating sound.

   "the sound of the siren resonated across the harbor"

   • 
     

     
     
   • 
     

     
     
2. 2.

   technical

   produce electrical or mechanical resonance.

   "the crystal resonates at 16 MHz"

Lately, this is a word that has been rumbling around in my head. I feel like there are moments when we know deeper than words can say, that something is merging between two people (and sometimes more).  

The physics here says that our electrons can get this close. Even the composition of every atom is about balance - none of us is fully fused together; we are continually falling apart and being put back together again. 

Resonation. 

When I was younger, I learned to play the classical guitar first. I received my first guitar on my 10th birthday. I can remember the smell of the finish - Italian wood and a cavernous sound that echoed through it as I unwrapped it. I can remember running my finger along the rosetta, along the bridge and strings. "This will be a voice for me", I thought. 

I named her Isabel. Mostly because it felt right, and I was 10. 

Before you play the guitar, you tune it. And this, was one of my favorite parts of learning to play. I took a tiny tuning fork, slung it against my knee and gently tapped the cold end of it to the belly of my guitar. Immediately a sound from nowhere would reverberate. This was a shy, but sure, sound - an 'A'. 

By this 'A' I would then lean my ear to the body of the guitar over and over, reach up, and gently creak the strings into sharper, or flatter pitches. I'd match the 'A' of the tuning fork to the 'A' of the string, then match the 'A' of the string to the 'A' I could play on the next string. 

And so and so forth - down the frets you go. Always going back to match the 'A'. Always strumming two strings together to see if they were dissonant. Always perceiving, listening, leaning in to hear more closely. 

Dissonant strings create a sound that sends two separate pieces. Played together the pieces just don't fit. Strings that are tuned play out a kind of hum that pulses together. It's so very clear when it happens but only when you play the two together, never when they are apart. 

I am taking 6 weeks to hear my heart and to begin to know what does and doesn't resonate. And I'm ok with anyone who thinks that sounds too mushy to make sense. As Rob Bell says, "Some things you do for you, and you alone." 

This is one of them. 

Why begin with mindfulness? Because mindfulness (among many other things in the last few months) has allowed me to be awake in my life for maybe the first time in 8 years. For all the time I have spent accidentally sleeping in meditation, practicing mindfulness has allowed me to really see what's in front of me. 

Honestly, this is a daunting task for me. Big picture-wise, I'm not used to asking for what I want, or knowing what that is. Most of the last 8 years has really just happened to me. I've been like an ant following the trail come hell or high water. I spent a lot of time flicking ants like these off their trails on the floor of my tent just to see how they'd react when thrown off course. 

I don't know what to say about the fact that they generally scramble back on their previous trajectories but with greater resolve. 

Right now - I'm embracing the not knowing part of this entire journey - but I'm hitting the tuning fork repeatedly and holding it to my chest.

"In the end, it's about what you want to be, not what you want to have. When you sign up to run a marathon, you don't want a taxi to take you to the finish line." - Derek Sivers 

Paper Tigers and Strawberries.

“There is a story of a woman running away from tigers. She runs and runs and the tigers are getting closer and closer. When she comes to the edge of a cliff, she sees some vines there, so she climbs down and holds on to the vines. Looking down, she sees that there are tigers below her as well. She then notices that a mouse is gnawing away at the vine to which she is clinging. She also sees a beautiful little bunch of strawberries close to her, growing out of a clump of grass. She looks up and she looks down. She looks at the mouse. Then she just takes a strawberry, puts it in her mouth, and enjoys it thoroughly. Tigers above, tigers below. This is actually the predicament that we are always in, in terms of our birth and death. Each moment is just what it is. It might be the only moment of our life; it might be the only strawberry we’ll ever eat. We could get depressed about it, or we could finally appreciate it and delight in the preciousness of every single moment of our life.” 

― Pema Chödrön, The Wisdom of No Escape

Tigers in Korean Folk Art

"To truly listen is to risk being changed forever."

A short passage from Mark Nepo, Book of Awakening: 

 “We all suffer, at times, from the effort to study something instead of living it. Or from the effort to fix or advise rather than to listen and to hold. So the first duty of love is to listen. When I think of times I have truly listened in my life – to the sea’s endless lapping, or to the sighs of my loved ones when they thought no one was near – it is receiving these simple truths that has made me a better person. So often when we refuse to listen, we become obsessed with remaking the world in our own image, rather than opening the spirit within us to the spirit of what is. At the deepest level, ours is not to make ourselves heard but to be still enough to hear. To truly listen is to risk being changed forever.”

Among other things, here's what I've been listening to lately: