Mountain Pilgrimage

 

 

I am on pilgrimage.  Away from the day-to-day life of making a living, tending to house and family, juggling the many demands and responsibilities.  I am pilgriming in the White Mountains of New Hampshire near where we had a cabin when I was a child. According to the definition, a pilgrim wanders solo in a new place far from home with the prayer for spiritual transformation.  Some rely on the hospitality of strangers for food and shelter. While my pilgrimage is not in a new place and I am staying in an Airbnb, I am on my own and I do seek, if not spiritual transformation, spiritual deepening.  Although this northern geography of majestic mountains, cascading rivers, and pine forests are not new to me, the unfolding inner landscape I find here in solitude and silence is.

 

My pilgrimage is prayerful in that I allow my heart to be open to inner longings and the grief and joy that enters a tender heart.  In the strong physical activity, taking one step after another over rough and steep mountainous terrain, I am absorbed in movement and breath. Just like asana practice, through this effort my consciousness settles down so that I might hear quieter inner voices, feel subtler inner presences.  In this quiet tenderness, the cascading veins of river, deep cut ravines, and liches strewn boulders enter my cells and change me as I walk.  I am visited by all the other reincarnations of myself that have climbed these mountains before. The fifteen-year-old in awe for the first time of their majesty and grandeur, the 20-year-old in love, the 30 year old on the transition to a new career, the 45 year old mother with her teenage daughter.   I might turn a corner and recall the time I had to put on mittens as the wind and snow tore over my raw skin, the bunk house where I stayed with a new friend packed in with many others in a fitful night of hardly any sleep, the college trip with the boy whose toes froze. 

 

In my twenties, these mountains were the one place I felt whole and calmed.  The lichen covered granite, the sudden fragrance of pine, the comfort of placing one foot after another to a summit allowed hope to seep up through the despair.  I felt a great emptiness when the hike was over, and I had to go back to my other life where I felt confused, incapable, and ashamed for this.  I longed to stay in the mountains where I felt safe and courageous.  But I could not stay there even though I longed to do so.  A strong pull for the chance to support myself well, to contribute to society, to be intellectually engaged and effective drew me into deeper engagement with world and away from the mountains.  I followed these callings day after day, year after year, even as I hardly ever felt successful.  The wholeness I felt in the mountains stayed with me as only a tiny thread that was easily misplaced.

 

What I didn’t know then was how the hard difficult, unmanageable, and messy way we make our way through the world is how we come into a more robust kind of wholeness, the kind that does not depend on the peace of the mountains.  It isn’t by trying to prevent the mess or keeping ourselves cut-off from it but rather going in really deep with as much compassion as we can muster that breaks open the inner barriers that keep us interiorly fractured and unwhole.  

 

On this pilgrimage, high on a ridge on a gloriously clear and sunny day, I looked down at the hut I had stayed at when I was 19.  I wondered what I might say to that young women if I could be with her now.  My first thought was to tell her do this and but don’t do that, trust me, I know where this will lead.  But then how would she learn what she needed to learn?  And how might her life unfold if she took another turn?  Perhaps the daughter would never be born, the graduate studies never undertaken, and long and precious process of healing forever out of reach.  So I gathered this young one up into my heart, brought her up to the mountain top and told her I would be with her now.  I would accompany her on her journey.  She could rest her head on my shoulder when all felt lost, when she felt unworthy. 

 

These parts of ourselves that we let down, could not care for, pushed into the abandoned shed, need us still.  When we receive them with a big, tender, open heart, we come into that greater wholeness, the harmony from the mountains woven into whole cloth not just lingering as a tiny thread.