Snow and Bliss

      So easy to dream of being elsewhere with a too long, Fall season. In early Fall, the landscape changes from green to bright colors; red, yellow and even acid green. In Late Fall, the ground hardens, leaves crush to barely discernible pulp. The weeds, ever hardy, bend over or shrivel into dried leaf blossoms on the ground.

     I see beauty in this slow decay. But decay and hibernation are different. The landscape for the last two months of 2015 has been mostly brown/gray and silent. A forest of barren tree branches with a ceiling of brown cracked glass skies showing blue between.

     Our forest bordering back yard does let us see deers tracks, trace the two footed jumps of rabbits and  the faint paw prints of foxes. We are lucky, I guess to have such neighbors, although the imposing wild Turkey, moving with their head and beaks jerking forward, scare me. I imagine myself attacked by them, a swarm moving over me, trampling me down and poking out my eyes. Or attacking my aging Cocker Spaniel who would bark and just incite them...Yes, I have had, probably too much time to ponder such images on my way through the brown, now deadened forest, warily watching their loud, gobbling progress from a safe distance away.

     Besides weariness with brown, another impact of this protracted Fall is to make me tired of the almost flat, of endless horizons. Walking across flat or even rolling hills is an mindful exercise in looking out and down. Looking at the beauty of small. Drying field grasses waving in a combing of the wind, a wire haired caterpillar at summer's end crossing the road ahead of me. The definition of smooth in the early morning green of a lake.

    The beauty of snow has historically helped me enjoy the flat landscape. Snow changes flat to a ruffled shininess. A white sparkle in bright sunlight. A slow moving river transformed to a frozen, curving white and blue path. Landmarks disappear. I like that. You can step down and not know how or if you will find the land below. You can look and not see the way, even though you should know, having walked every inch of this landscape many times. Snow changes the ordinary, the familiar.
   
    My mind must still cope with walking along at the same rate of speed and not seeing much difference for miles. The flat landscape challenges me to have hope and faith without the bigger markers of change. In the mountains, going up means seeing progress and you can look back, yes into the recent past and see how far you have come. Each step is about effort and breath. My perspective changes as I look back and down. Hope and faith are easier.

     Maybe because of my work, I like seeing concrete changes. As a psychotherapist, I work with emotional challenges. The client and I can't see them. There is something so refreshing about being to  see, looking back, that part is done and to see the challenge ahead. It energizes me after so much time spent working with the complicated, internal mind.

     Although, in climbing, there is the internal, character challenge of the false summit. The "false summit" looks like the real summit. Sometimes, there are multiple false summits. It's a flat place you attain after a vertical climb. Standing on it, you realize there is much more climbing to be done. Author and noted mythologist, Joesph Campbell writes, there is always a challenging setback within any larger life task or journey.

     For me, there is little triumph on reaching the summit. The summits I have reached, (and there are not many!) have been visually anticlimactic; cold, rocky and windy. Looking out, gray mountains are streaming away to a blurred horizon. The best parts are the sound and feeling. The sound at the top of a mountain is the best kind of quiet. It's more hushed than the waiting quiet before the music starts, more pure than the soft quiet in a church. Its a lovely sound especially combined with my own insignificance standing in this centuries old place and the feeling of being above the clouds, closer to God.

     But snow is a temporary covering in the flat world. I feel more alive standing in snow, knowing wind, melt and sun could change this landscape as soon as tomorrow.  There is a different type of quiet composed of the sound compressing nature of white, draping plants and ground. Sounds seem sharper, more startling against this muffled prolonged silence.
   
     The mental challenges are different. I can recognize now, with a change in my own perspective, that I was never challenged enough. It is, I guess, a character flaw, this need for difficulty.  My thinking has always been about getting through the hike, enjoying the small, seeing the beauty. I have trouble slowing down. I wasn't fully committed. Mountains with their obvious physical challenges, are I guess, the type of challenge I needed to fully commit. Going up requires more effort, more commitment and certainly, more risk.

    One of the lesser known facts about climbing a mountain is the amount of risk involved in coming down.  The slope looks more vertical. The increased risk of physical tiredness, the careless thinking of just wanting to get down to rest, to eat, to end the day. Even more dangerous for me is I love coming down. I usually speed up and get a rhythm of running and walking down. Going up is deliberate placement, about strength, slowness in mind and body. The burden, in a way, of the goal; reaching the summit.  Going down, for me, has a kind of careless joy.

     I like the satisfying completion in climbing a mountain and in both cases, the centered, calm feeling of spending a day outside. A hike through a forest or down a trail is easy to put in my memory  as a good day. The flat landscape of Minnesota, even parts with rolling hills, dotted with beautiful footprints of green lakes doesn't call to me.  I mean, I don't think, I have to get back out there. I don't feel the landscape has changed my perspective on life, tested my character ( there is that need for difficulty again!). Here, I am changed by my connections to the people; the people I love, my friends, my clients.
   
     I guess it all comes back to change. I am working to accept my experience with mountains, for some reason, has changed me into a person more willing to step outside my familiar, flat landscape. I can admit, looking up at a pile of dauntingly high rock, I'd love to climb that. And feel thirsty to climb that. And here in Minnesota, in the midst of lovely winter snow,  I miss mountains. And while there is a voice inside, at first saying, now whispering, What if you hurt yourself? Why not do something easier, cheaper?  and even, my own internalized parent saying, this doesn't seem like a very rational choice, Margot. I can now reply, because this makes me happy.  I am at peace with this craziness. I acknowledge it is unexplainable.... except in the area of timing.

    My belief is the right time is a powerful force for change. So, for me, in my 20's I climbed a few mountains. I did love it. But at the time, love in my life, love of my work pushed those feelings down to a thread of sound. And I let those feelings go, distracted by marriage, children, snow, canoeing, cross country skiing, running, biking. I feel lucky now and more determined having been given a second chance.

     My clients have taught me as much as my own life experiences have, that making the needed changes, accepting pain and growing is very hard work. Sometimes change doesn't make sense. I think of internal change, rightly or wrongly, as a perfect storm of different feelings, thoughts, timing and opportunities in a life. Synchronicity.

    But, what I believe is harder than change itself, is going back to your daily life. Or as author Joesph Campbell says, (paraphrasing) once the journey is over, you have to learn how to live, changed, in the same old world. It's a bigger challenge.

     Our old world wants us to change back. Once we change, internally, from climbing a mountain to a cascade of external life events.... We're not able to change back. We can only go on. For all of us, isn't the question how we will change our life to reflect the internal change?

     Here is another piece of the irrational.  Which I find funny, yes funny as I recognize and do this myself. We all do! We all stand on both sides of this dilemma. We want people in our lives to accept our changes easily, willingly, even with hand clapping support. But turn it around. Do we want the people in our lives to change and to give them hand clapping support? Sometimes, if... we like the change, if... its not uncomfortable... or too much and other qualifiers! Its funny and irrational!

     Both mountains and plains satisfy my longing for hiking and being outside. Snow helps my restlessness with the flat landscape as a kind of beautiful distraction. But more importantly and without completely knowing why, I have discovered hiking and climbing make me happy.

      So, I know I'll continue to climb mountains. And that is a change, directly coming from my experience with them. And probably, where I am in my life and who I am now. It's a commitment I haven't developed with years of contact with lakes and plains. I don't know why. But as a typical human being with a human life span..."Follow your bliss" Joesph Campbell also said. And so, I will.