The wind blows strong in this glorious light, lines of snow pulled outstretched off the high peaks to my south. The engine quiet, I sit here aghast at the brilliance of this beautiful world. I have spent hours digging across the slide path en route to our cabin, the recent storm depositing much-needed feet of crystalline water, returning this land here to winter and ensuing challenges.

Yet, this is the first moment I have taken to really be in it, the vastness, the miracle of light, snow, cloud, movements... this everything-ness, wide awake in daylight winter mountain magic.

Getting beyond the to-do list can be difficult, both in our day-to-day lives and also within ceremony. I have seen this in myself almost every time I have taken myself into a rite-of-passage ceremony, and I have heard others recount the same.

Last summer, as we were preparing to guide a backpacking rite-of-passage quest into the Olympic National Park for the 4th consecutive summer, the logistics of all the preparations were taking a lot of time and our schedule was being swamped. It felt like there was so much to do. Eventually, the bags were packed and we took our small group into the forest just above basecamp to have our first talking circle. I could feel the tension growing, the desire for us to get in the cars and depart, a throb of impatience just below the surface. As the piece came to me, I realized that by taking this time, sitting in a circle with one another and beginning to really listen, this was doing so much.

It was a turn of phrase which exemplified my own struggle: the rush and inner pulse to get going, get the journey started, get to the destination. Deeply, however, what I really wanted to hold and really hoped to cultivate inside myself and in this program was greater awareness that each moment of our lives is the destination. To sit in circle, begin to open to the vulnerability of our shared Earthen-ness and humanity, was the most precious of gifts.

That was doing so much.

If you follow the San Pedro River north out of San Pedro de Atacama in North Chile (highly recommend you rent a mountain bike for the journey), you will come to the Catarpe Valley. This valley, like many of the others nearby, takes its name from the indigenous people who live there and whose ancestors have lived there for millennia. Graciously, they allow visitors to enter and wander the riparian corridor and beautiful canyons, all set within one of the driest and highest desert places on Earth.

Continuing onward a few kilometers, just past a small bridge that has such a dearth of water flowing under that one might forget the desert abounding on all sides, there is a small trail that meanders off to the right (east) named Garganta del Diablo: throat of the devil. I have never understood the colonial-era propensity for naming such profoundly glorious places with such absurd allusions to monotheistic mythological figures. At the start of the entrance, there is a sign:

We will never know the value of water until the well is empty.

Yet, there is an unceasing and mostly unstated pulse in our culture to hustle, to work as hard as we can, to be productive, what the Dalai Lama has called a 'busy sickness.' On so many levels, such inner calculus makes sense, emerging from the dire need to survive in this money-centric, profit-driven world. Opportunities are not equal and inequalities surround. The to-do lists get made and remade on all levels until each aspect of our day is filtered toward maximizing efficiency and value-adds and minimizing opportunity costs and unnecessary exigencies.

I get dizzy just considering all of us, the world over, lost in that cycle of modernity.

So, the question then comes back to each of us: is this really how we want to live? All of our moments? All of our days? Are these living manifestations of wants, needs, dreams so proffered by this accelerating culture truly our dreams, wants, needs?

Even if, as Glendinning suggested (2002), the education we received and is ongoingly transferred from this culture is "designed to reproduce in me(us) the perception, thinking, and body language of a citizen of empire," we can choose to let that go (Kindle Locations 219-221). 

As Macy and Brown (2014) explained, "Sometimes the best choice is to let go, to fall apart" (p. 52). In so many ways, that moment is where the ceremony begins, where the natural healing returns.

To me, one of the most profound moments in a wilderness immersive experience is just how quickly these ingrained patterns and sociocultural ideas can fall away when we are once again surrounded by the vast and wild landscape of the lifeworld; if we let them. First-person observation of that process from thirty-plus years of guiding wilderness immersion programs led Robert Greenway (1995) to theorize that civilization is only three-days deep.

Even if we cannot take the time away, or for a vast set of completely reasonable reasons we cannot depart our daily lives, we might choose to practice what Pema Chodron (2022) calls the pause practice, where we just stop whatever we are doing and take a moment of peace (p. 40). Such a simple act can help us interrupt our complicity in being completely immersed in our thoughts, in our to-do lists, in our daily grinds.

And there, miles away and thousands of feet above me, the wind still pulls the snow from the west face of the granite mountains and drives it east in long arcs across the sky. Soon, I will restart the engine and make my way onward. But I feel grateful for these few minutes letting the mountain winds pull apart the stuffiness of my busy-ness and etch again sunlight and peace onto my fleeting existence. 

Happy Birthday Colleen Bishop

I  want to take this moment to wish my dear love and cofounder of Alchemy of Prana a happy birthday <3. Her shining light of peace, of compassion, of empathy, of consciousness, of beauty and wisdom is such a gift to this heart of mine and to this human and more-than-human lifeworld community. I am forever grateful and humbled to love you baby.

References

Chodron, P. (2022). How we live is how we die. Shambhala Publications, Inc.

Glendinning, C. (2002). Off the map: An expedition deep into empire and the global economy. New Society Publishers. [Kindle edition]

Greenway, R. (1995). The wilderness effect and ecopsychology. In T. Roszak, M. E. Gomes, & A. D. Kanner, (Eds.), Ecopsychology: Restoring the earth, healing the mind (pp. 122-135). Sierra Club Books.

Macy, J., & Brown, M. (2014). Coming back to life. New Society Publishers.