Thresholds

Oh, what can I say?  I have been very deep in the process of moving, helping the children through the end of their school year, and finishing up the details of a wedding that is day after tomorrow.  Oh, and working three jobs.  I am ready for things to calm down!  After so many years of a very slow lifestyle, this has been a challenging nine months!

I was talking to an old friend yesterday about thresholds, and crossing them.  It seems to me, with my limited view, that we women have quite a number of them in our lives.  Womanhood, mothering, loss, new life, shifting seasons.  I have come to see that moving through those places almost always results in something better, newer versions of our older selves.  I had a moment of panic last week, knowing that things are about to change forever.

I had one of those before my first date with Bill, too.  It was as though I knew I was standing on the edge of something very big.  I took the children up to the Snail Place and we watched the sunset, me knowing it was the last time it would be just the four of us.  We stood there and really soaked it in, and the next day, I was on another mountaintop beside someone new, experiencing all kinds of new feelings.  It was a threshold, a crossroads, and I stepped into a new season of life that has brought us all such joy.

And so I'm getting ready to do all that again, stepping over another crack in a rock, and taking Bill's hand to do it.  I've moved East, the place of the future, and I'm walking new roads.

High on the Mountain, Wind Blowing Free

Last Thursday, Bill and I had engagement pictures taken by Alison Little.  It was spur of the moment, but I'm so glad we did it.  I had agreed to be a model for her explorations of depression and anxiety, so she offered to take some photos of the two of us.  What a treat! 

We met up on Whitetop, our state's second highest peak, and her favorite place.  The wind was blowing wildly and fitfully, but it was so much fun.  This metal map needs its own post, but suffice it to say that it has Whitetop and Elk Garden, my favorite places.  Bill made it very early on, and it is a map to my heart.  He's a machinist, and this is his masterpiece.

I am SO giggly, have been for well over a year now, and SO self-aware, but Alison did such a wonderful job capturing the two introverts that we are.  Cameras make us both want to hide, as much as we enjoy taking pictures.  These are probably the first pictures of myself that I have truly loved.

 
See?  I'm not hiding!  It makes me smile so widely to think of it all!

This picture might be one of my favorites.  I feel so safe and so loved.  It is beyond anything I could have imagined for myself.  My children are so happy and loved, too.  All the years of loneliness and longing have melted away and make sense now.  I had to walk that trail so I could get here, and I am so excited to see what is ahead.  I am old enough to know that life doesn't get any easier, but it surely is sweeter these days.

Revelations

Last June, I walked to Rowlands Creek Falls again.  I had been there with the children the year before, and it sparked so many memories and reflections in those early Autumn days.  For weeks, my dreams took me to other places and times, and then mixed them up.  The past became my future, and I wondered how that could ever be.  It filled my drifting mind and showed me small glimmers of hope.  This hike was a chance to consider all of that again.

  
I was looking for the elusive bottom of the falls, as they are 150' long.  I had various attempts at bushwhacking, all fruitless and a little precarious.  Did they stretch the hillside and make it steeper scrambling back up?  All the same, I did carefully make my way down to enjoy it all.  I had wonderful empowering revelations along the way, chances to consider the new life before me and marvel at it all.  Joy mixed with pain, as a fair part of the Summer was.  I was so anxious to see what was ahead.  Optimism and caution wrestled back and forth. 

Standing in Rowlands Creek, my beloved sandals gave out.  It wasn't too bad--they were still able to make the walk in one piece.  But, retirement was swift.  As good as I am at getting rid of things, I put these in my archives, a memorial to many adventures.  It was almost a moment of jubilation, and I laughed at myself.  So much laughter in the months to follow.  After fifteen years, a new chapter was beginning.

Long Under Grass

No, no, there is no going back.
Less and less you are
that possibility you were.
More and more you have become
those lives and deaths
that have belonged to you.
You have become a sort of grave
containing much that was
and is no more in time, beloved
then, now, and always.
And so you have become a sort of tree
standing over a grave.
Now more than ever you can be
generous toward each day
that comes, young, to disappear
forever, and yet remain
unaging in the mind.
Every day you have less reason
not to give yourself away.

~Wendell Berry



After I stepped away from this space, I walked mile after mile, both behind a mower and on the trails that link our forests and streams.  Old friendships were rekindled, and new ones were forged.  Some of you, if you are still here, followed me on Instagram and saw the wonderful waterfalls and wide vistas.  I stood in countless streams, full of longing and doing some hard inner work that helped me to grow so very much.  It was a summer that I knew would never come again.

I completed the 52 hikes in record time, about six months after I began, and have kept going toward 100.  There were no repeats on any of the hikes, and I revisited some places I had not been in fifteen years.  One hike included 600 stairs, while others required climbing boulders down to see waterfalls.  A couple were easy.  I lost twenty pounds and gained a lot of grit.  I did a lot of looking back as I found my way forward.

On hike 33, I met the man that I am marrying in six weeks.  That was on the Endless Wall Trail above the New River Gorge.  I asked him to take my hand as I stepped over a precarious crack in a big rock.  Something in my heart never wanted to be away from him, and we have been practically inseparable ever since.  Our first date was hike 35 and Bill told me he loved me on hike 37.  He proposed at the Snail Place on a snowy evening in late January.

It has been a year of miracles, nothing else.  I cannot tell you how full of wonder the whole experience has been.  My faith that was lukewarm has been renewed, and I can say that God hears our deepest longings, even when we think we're the only ones.  There have been plenty of challenges, as life never stops, but the way has been easier to bear than it ever has.  I tried my best to go into it all with my heart and eyes open, and I have been richly blessed.  My children have found someone with whom their hearts are safe.

It feels like many things have come to fruition that were decades in the making.  National Forests and public lands have figured heavily into my story.  The renewed love of place that I experienced a few years ago has grown stronger.  I hope to share some stories of my hikes in this space, even as I am in the throes of moving, wedding planning, and work transitions.  A little quiet time each morning to write and reflect is still so nourishing to me, and our memories fade so quickly.

I hope to see you all soon!

Rivers and Streams

With the lark in the morning
And the dew upon the dawn
Well, a-home we came a crawling
With our sickness and our song

~"McCormack's Wall" :: Glen Hansard 

Most mornings, I take a walk to my special places right outside my door.  I walk through the wet grass to the fruit trees, remembering and dreaming.  Music has been my nearly constant companion, and I do often carry my phone with Spotify playing (yes! I have a phone now!).  If Glen Hansard has had anything to do with it, I've been listening to what he's had to sing.  At least one of them even became prophetic for me.  I first learned of him when NPR covered the excitement around Once back in 2007.  The songs drifted in and out, but they were always there in the background.  I guess songs that stare hard feelings in the eyes are the kind of soundtrack I need right now. 

I don't know what I am trying to say here, what I am trying to filter out or include.  There is no sadness in leaving an awful marriage.  There is sadness in cleaning up what is left over, in starting again after such a long time.  I get told how brave I am, and I think that I had no other choice.  There was no one else to do it.  I am weary.  I have become more social, more pro-active, tougher.  I have felt that I needed to be purposeful in my actions, since life felt more like things that happened to me, rather than I things I chose.  That has had mixed results, of course, as putting ourselves out there opens us up to risks.  All the same, it is good to take them.  I'd hate for my life to pass and think that I had not tried.

I guess I am still waiting for the next step to find me, even though I have taken so many steps into the future.  There's a song for that, of course.

Between Showers

May!  The rainy month!  But, oh, how lush and green everything is growing.  It is hard to believe it was all bare three weeks ago.  Yesterday, we went up to Elk Garden to see the sights.  In spite of the humidity and passing clouds, it was fog-free!

Okay, there was a little fog on Mount Rogers, but that's to be expected.  I don't think I've mentioned that this is our state's highest peak at 5729'.  It's around 7-9 miles round trip from any approach and the summit is entirely covered in a sort of relic boreal forest.  Just my kind of place!  It's on my list to return later this year.

Yesterday, however, we followed the Appalachian Trail just into the woods, after a little bouldering for the children.  I met a lovely couple who had me take their picture, and we exchanged our stories of this wonderful place where we live.  Even though 30 or more years separated us, we agreed the mountains never leave you. 

Into the forest, to the place the children have named "Brambly Hedge."  What a lovely carpet of Spring flowers, so pleasant to walk through.  Not a stinging nettle in sight!

And then, back towards the trailhead and home.  These weathered wooden posts and wind-beaten hawthorn trees will never leave me, either.

If this is any indication of all the rain we've gotten, here's the delightful little waterfall that the AT was yesterday.  Those are the stairs leading into the woods toward Whitetop. 

Every stream was rushing and roaring, water was flowing across the roads.  I just wanted to lay down in a creek and let it flow across me.

Transitions

I registered the children for public school yesterday.  It wasn't something I thought I'd ever do.  I'm the kind of person to make a decision and see it through until the bitter end.  But this one wasn't that.  Life these days is about making my own choices, seeing I have options, taking up new things because I want to.  That sounds oversimplified, and I guess it is.  When I write things here, there are many layers to my words, things I could never say. 

Really, it was happy moment when I made the decision.  I know I have given my all to my children for nearly ten years now.  What they need from me is different now.  What I need is different.  I need to work, of course, and to stand on ridge tops, and to share what I have with others.  My world is getting bigger and smaller at the same time.  I am learning to be patient, to be okay with open ends, and to tie up others.

I always like to know where I am going, but that's not a part of things any more.  I can't explain it with any accuracy, but I guess it is a universal experience for this kind of thing.  It feels nearly impossible to tell people how I don't want my old life, how glad I am now, how so many old burdens have fallen away, and how the new responsibilities do feel like very heavy things.  I know what I have now, and where I have been.  Oh, that is so freeing and so terrifying. 

Topophilia

We, this people, on this small and drifting planet
Whose hands can strike with such abandon
That in a twinkling, life is sapped from the living
Yet those same hands can touch with such healing, irresistible tenderness . . .
 
When we come to it
We, this people, on this wayward, floating body
Created on this earth, of this earth
Have the power to fashion for this earth
A climate where every man and every woman
Can live freely without sanctimonious piety
Without crippling fear

When we come to it
We must confess that we are the possible
We are the miraculous, the true wonder of this world
That is when, and only when
We come to it.

~Maya Angelou :: "A Brave and Startling Truth"

A love of place seems to surround all I do lately.  I share places with people, like they are favorite songs or prized possessions.  I talk about places, I visit them, I avoid them, I cling to them, I daydream about them.  I lay myself bare to places.  I redefine them.  I walk into them with my fears cast aside, and then return when I am broken, seeking healing.

Even though I love the land, it is the people who have shared that land with me that give another level of meaning to my places.  My life has had some very deeply intense moments in it lately, ones that have taken every bit of bravery that I could muster.  This whole year has been so unexpected to me.  It seems everything I have know has been turned on its ear.

I have reached great heights, tall peaks with grand views, only to find myself in the valley all over again.  My heart feels as though it might burst.  I have to remember, even with all my topophilia, to keep going back to my places.

Dawn

I arise from rest with movements
swift as the beat of a raven's wings.
I arise to meet the day.

My face is turned from the dark of night
to gaze at the dawn of day,
now whitening in the sky.

~Iglulik Eskimo Poem :: Wassail! Wassail!  Early American Christmas Music

So many beautiful sunrises this week.  I have been listening to a lot of Glen Hansard and The Swell Season lately.  He's a wonderful live performer, and somewhere he said that happy days are often blank in journals.  I do some private writing these days, but I completely understand what he says.  There are things that are so hard to put into words.  All the same, I've felt some documentation was essential.  Pardon my silence and poetry, but know that I am so very happy.

Pause

I must down to the seas again, to the lonely sea and the sky,
And all I ask is a tall ship and a star to steer her by,
And the wheel's kick and the wind's song and the white sail's shaking,
And a grey mist on the sea's face, and a grey dawn breaking.

I must down to the seas again, for the call of the running tide
Is a wild call and a clear call that may not be denied;
And all I ask is a windy day with the white clouds flying,
And the flung spray and the blown spume, and the sea-gulls crying.

I must down to the seas again, to the vagrant gyspy life,
To the gull's way and the whale's way where the wind's like a whetted knife;
And all I ask is a merry yarn from a laughing fellow-rover
And a quiet sleep and a sweet dream when the long trick's over.

~"Sea-Fever" ~ John Masefield :: As taken from The Waldorf Book of Poetry

The children saw the ocean for the first time on Sunday.  It was both new and old to me, as I hadn't been in such a very long time.  We camped right in front of the water at a place that goes back to my mother's childhood.  It was a trip that left me feeling torn--I was anxious to keep on with things here.  I knew getting away was needed, like the final step of a long walk or an intersection between trails.  I'll call it a pause, then, a chance to spend some time in daydream and reflection before getting back to work.

I'm now a "long walks on the beach" person, and I took one at the end of nearly every day.  I went under the guise of photographing my dad's kites in action.  The waves gave a wonderful backdrop to my own thoughts and small revelations.  I think people see my situation as a very sad one, but it isn't.  It's glaringly, staggeringly hope-filled.  I have to stop myself from running wildly into the future.

Coming back to the mountains, back to feeling "hemmed in" again, was emotional.  Willow teased me a little, but I do so love this place.  It really is forever a part of me, as much as some other places beckon me to visit.

 

There's a place called Far-away Meadow
We never shall mow in again,
Or such is the talk at the farmhouse:
The meadow is finished with men.
Then now is the chance for the flowers
That can't stand mowers and plowers.
It must be now, through, in season
Before the not mowing brings trees on,
Before trees, seeing the opening,
March into a shadowy claim.
The trees are all I'm afraid of,
That flowers can't bloom in the shade of;
It's no more men I'm afraid of;
The meadow is done with the tame.
The place for the moment is ours
For you, oh tumultuous flowers,
To go to waste and go wild in,
All shapes and colors of flowers,
I needn't call you by name.

 ~"The Last Mowing" :: Robert Frost

My path to enlightenment is paved with waving grasses and the sweet violets of Spring.  It rained all week, setting the grass to seed and giving me a weekend full of mowing.  That's my primary work, at the moment.  A woman with a mower and a wide-brimmed hat.  If a man with a plow walked 5+ miles to an acre, well, I guess that's me, too.  I mowed the berry patch and peach orchard today, and I felt it looked like heaven.  The thick grass, the blooming trees, the promise of things to come.

I've been reading The Old Ways lately, a book about walking and places. Robert MacFarlane walks all manner of places, both local and abroad.  He talks at length about melancholic people walking to cope with the world.  I suppose it is my dream life.  I have been taking the other good weather time to see the wild places, alone and with the children.  I will walk my way to the sublime, whether it be on a gentle hillside or the shores of a lake.

I feel the strong need to be alone lately, like I could never get my fill of it, though I know I will.  I have been alone a long time, though this is new.  I guess what I want is privacy, the chance to have complete thoughts and get lost in daydreams.  I can see visions of my life to come and visions of the lives that once tended the places I mow.  I have been doing that a lot lately.  Some pictures are so clear, I hardly know what to do with them.  "Time will tell" is my new maxim.

Snail Therapy

That's the Western half of my little town down there.  It's quite hilly, though I live on the flat-ish karst side that the mountains hide from this view.

Spring is spring beauties right now.  Other flowers are slow in coming, but I expect a bumper crop of Dutchman's breeches soon.  Otherwise, the woods up high are still pretty silent, brown places.

Whether the winds or squirrels made this little cache, I love it.  I know it was the wind that swept most of the leaves away, leaving plenty of treasures uncovered.

Always snail shells.  Always.

The children re-wilded, if you want to call it that.  They were so happy to be in their place again and worked tirelessly on their vintage bottle and can collection.

The buckeyes are always the first to leaf out and always get burned by the frosts.  I think, if I were a tree, I'd be a buckeye.  Not because I am purported to be half poisonous, but because I am always so anxious for the next phase of life. 

If I could be more like the moss, patiently making my way, now that would be something. 

When despair for the world grows in me 
and I wake in the night at the least sound 
in fear of what my life and my children’s lives may be, 
I go and lie down where the wood drake 
rests in his beauty on the water, and the great heron feeds. 
I come into the peace of wild things 
who do not tax their lives with forethought 
of grief.  I come into the presence of still water. 
And I feel above me the day-blind stars waiting with their light. For a time 
I rest in the grace of the world, and am free.

~Wendell Berry

Things as They Come

My children look at the world so differently than I did at their age.  They are so much more awake.  I've considered that my own childhood was a series of things that happened to me.  Maybe much of my life has been that way?  I was just swept along with the tide, ever-accepting of things as they came. 

Am I now in a new season of my life where I take the reins and make things happen on my own?  I see myself making new connections in everyday settings.  I see people happy to meet me.  I see the world as an open place, and myself ready to meet it!  What a powerful feeling to have!

I have come to the frightening conclusion that I am the decisive element.

It is my personal approach that creates the climate.

It is my daily mood that makes the weather.

I possess tremendous power to make a life miserable or joyous.

I can be a tool of torture, or an instrument of inspiration.

I can humiliate or humor, hurt or heal.

In all situations, it is my response that decides whether a crisis will be escalated or de-escalated, and person humanized or dehumanized.

If we treat people as they are, we make them worse.

It we treat people as they ought to be, we help them become what they are capable of becoming.

~Goethe, as taken from The Waldorf Book of Poetry

April

I looked out the window on Monday night and it was snowing sideways.  Spring is so slow in coming to stay this year.  I guess nearly everyone has the same thing to report.  It was gloriously warm yesterday and we did our best to soak it in.  Nature school at our local state park, time on the porch, and a picnic in the backyard.  The wind kept me up much of the night, along with the restless feelings that April always seems to bring me.  I didn't mind this time.

My mind is so full of things right now that I don't think I really form words around it all.  It is good, mostly, to be sure, some of it overwhelmingly so.  The new shape of my life suits me very well and I feel myself coming into a new place.  This little quotation has been a help to me lately, so I thought I would share it here.  I found it in The Waldorf Book of Poetry, which seems to have no end of good material, all around.

Our deepest fear is not that we are inadequate. Our deepest fear is that we are powerful beyond measure. It is our light, not our darkness that most frightens us. We ask ourselves, 'Who am I to be brilliant, gorgeous, talented, fabulous?'

Actually, who are you not to be? You are a child of God.

Your playing small does not serve the world. There is nothing enlightened about shrinking so that other people won't feel insecure around you.

We are all meant to shine, as children do. We were born to make manifest the glory of God that is within us. It's not just in some of us; it's in everyone. And as we let our own light shine, we unconsciously give other people permission to do the same. As we are liberated from our own fear, our presence automatically liberates others.

~Marianne Williamson

Symbols of Eternity

The hills are our symbols of eternity.  There they stand, the evidence of things seen, as nearly everlasting and unchangeable as anything man may know.  One who has dwelled within them senses that they are beyond the horizon, even when he is in the level lands.  For this reassurance, all hill people will be duly thankful. . . 

In some manner, a mountain country places its mark on those who dwell within its shadows.  Scots carry with them a Highland pride of birth and place, even though they may wander thousands of miles from heather-covered moors. . . And thus it is with those nurtured in Appalachia--they leave, but they look back, remembering pleasant things.  The land has claimed them, and its ties will not be severed.

Maurice Brooks :: The Appalachians

We traveled over to Rich Valley yesterday, a winding and welcome journey after a long Winter.  We visited the Swing Place, of course, and collected daffodils for our pleasure at home.  I never tire of these views, never.  I would gladly live in that little house with the karst limestone so very near.  When I do leave these mountains and find flat, straight roads, I feel oddly without my navigational bearings.  I hardly know what to do when I am not hemmed in and I always feel glad to come home.

As my life changes and I find new footing, I feel glad for these mountains.  Of course, I have to redefine my mental picture of many of my favorite places.  Fifteen years prior, that seemed almost too painful for me to do, but now I see them with new, hopeful eyes.  These places have been here years beyond counting.  They know what to do.

Unimagined Bridges

As once the winged energy of delight
carried you over childhood's dark abysses,
now beyond your own life build the great
arch of unimagined bridges.

Wonders happen if we can succeed
in passing through the harshest danger;
but only in a bright and purely granted
achievement can we realize the wonder...

Rainer Maria Rilke :: Ahead of All Parting, translated by Steven Mitchell

I love this photo--it may be as close as we get to the maple festival this weekend.  The forecast promises snow, and Whitetop always gets more that its fair share.  This page is from one of those old National Geographic Society photo books that they made in great quantities in the 70s.  I picked up several for free at the thrift store, along with others I have been given from family.  Their photographers did such a wonderful job at capturing an America in a golden age, before things changed so swiftly with the increasing dependence on technology.  The photos of small town folks of all ages send me back to my childhood, to a time that feels so far away now.

Can I tell you that it has been a hard week?  Oh, it has.  It seems each passing week gets more difficult, instead of easier.  The weight of it all, the unexpected things that keep coming up.  It feels like everything is condensed into a small stretch of time, and really, it is.  A month from tomorrow, I'll be divorced, not in the married club any more, no longer able to refer to anyone as "my husband."  I've kept quiet about many things, but I do think it does help to share some of what this burden is.  An at-fault divorce moves quickly, and all those loose ends need tying up at a brisk pace.

I feel like a lost ship these days, and other times I am firmly anchored.  I am happier than I have been in years, and yet I feel such sadness.  I guess that is the way of it for many people, such freedom and then so many doors that feel closed now.  The part of me that is optimistic feels that there must be great wonders waiting for me.  And there is another part of me, that melancholic me, that feels I have come to some sad dead end.  I guess it is not like either thing, and probably a little of both.  The road that I have walked feels like has been paved with small miracles.  That I do know.

Nature School :: The Sledding Place

Keeping up with our "place" names, there's The Sledding Place.  We picnicked here in the Summer and came to see the leaves in Autumn, but it is forever known as The Sledding Place. 

Properly, it is the Lewis Fork Trailhead in the Fairwood Valley, the former site of an old logging operation.  It is land that was "taken" by the Forest Service to create the National Recreation Area.  Takings are complicated things, but I am (secretly) glad they did.  It is a beautiful place.

We went looking for the snow we tried to see earlier in the week.  With days below freezing, it was still there.  It's eighteen right now!  We're expecting a warmer stretch, though, so we had to make tracks.  Speaking of tracks, there were deer and bear tracks, which the children really enjoyed following. 

Competing with snowy hillsides, the creek was lots of fun and peril, too.  Everything was slippery, except the snow, and I think nearly all of us broke through small frozen puddles before it was over.

I got some photos before the children got to it and had fun breaking up some of the ice.  I told them to save most of it for other visitors to see.  I think we were only the second guests to the forest in this snow and the other tracks were older.

I think we could have all looked for hours, but I dragged us back for some more sledding before the sun sank too low.

That holly bush is our landmark.  We climb to it and then set off.  There's only one rock sticking up, so it can be a pretty good slide to the bottom.  Willow and I road down it together last year--it felt like a roller coaster ride!

Thoroughly soaked and a little frozen, we returned home to our mostly snow-free street.  There were some men taking down a couple old, dead trees (we loved those trees) and I think we looked a little funny getting out sleds and wet coats.  I showed one of the men the photos and I think he was pleased.  Good old fashioned fun!