Coming to (Snowy) Ground

 
STONE
(Thobar Phádraig)

The face in the stone is a mirror looking into you.
You have gazed into the moving waters,
you have seen the slow light, in the sky
above Lough Inagh, beneath you, streams have flowed,
and rivers of earth have moved beneath your feet,
but you have never looked into the immovability
of stone like this, the way it holds you, gives you
not a way forward but a doorway in, staunches
your need to leave, becomes faithful by going nowhere,
something that wants you to stay here and look back,
be weathered by what comes to you, like the way you too
have travelled from so far away to be here, once reluctant
and now as solid and as here and as willing
to be touched as everything you have found.

Whyte, David (2015-12-10). The Sea in You: Twenty Poems of Requited and Unrequited Love (Kindle Locations 388-390). Many Rivers Press. Kindle Edition. 

When I first moved to Oregon eleven years ago one of the things I was most excited about were the opportunities to backpack and climb the mountains to gain, as John Muir puts it, their good tidings. When I was in high school I spent six weeks living and working in the Hiawatha Forest in Michigan’s Upper Peninsula. I made two trips to Big Bend National Park when I lived in Austin, and I hiked sections of the Appalachian trail in the Delaware Water Gap when we lived in New Jersey. But none of this even approached the grandeur and the sheer wildness of Oregon. At least that’s what I was hoping would be the case.

You know that “beware of what you ask for” phrase? Yeah…

After my first Easter in Tualatin, I was ready for a break. After consulting several guide books, I settled on the Middle Santiam Wilderness. It was only a few hours drive from where I lived into the Cascade Mountains. The book claimed the Middle Santiam was one of the more remote areas making it possible to go for days without seeing another human being. This was exactly what I was wanting. The book also said it was best June through August… it didn’t say: “Can kill you in March.”

Of course if you live here you know better than to head into the mountains in Spring. But I was new and excited. So, I took my faithful black lab, Rigby, and we headed down I-5. We wound around Detroit Lake on OR-22, and then we climbed into the foothills of the Cascades. The traces of snow I saw on the Doug Firs turned into a winter wonderland by the time I was heading up the single lane logging road to the trail head. While this should have filled me with caution, I was only getting more and more excited. And Rigby was with me. Her tail was wagging ninety miles a minute. Several miles before I was close to the trail head the snow and ice became such that I really couldn’t go further without putting on chains. I didn’t feel like going to the effort, and I was there to hike anyway, so I just pulled over at a wide place and parked. What’s a few more miles, I said to Rigs. Was she game? She totally was.

About ten miles later we finally made it to the trailhead and we officially embarked. We only made it a few miles when I came to the fork of the Middle Santiam River. Rigby just looked at me. Ruh-ro… Where there was supposed to be a crossing we found a roaring torrent raging. (This is what happens in Oregon in the spring as the glaciers begin to melt.) So, we decided to back up to what felt like a safe distance and just make camp for the night. It was getting dark anyway, and I thought maybe it would be better in the morning.

Yeah…

In the morning when we woke up it was so, so quiet. It wasn’t just silent, it was as if sound itself was being swallowed up. Intrigued, I poked my head out of my tent. SNOW! It was snowing. And my tent was half covered in it already. Enormous flakes, soft, fat flakes the size of a quarter were falling and blanketing the ground. This was even more exciting! Rigby tore off into the snow just full of joy to be alive.

I put my ironically named Vasque Sundowners on and ventured out to see what I could see. We walked over to the bank to see if the river had abated. Rigs and I glanced at one other. Hardly. If anything it seemed to be rushing harder. Then, beginning to realize how hard it was walking in snow that was already knee level and rapidly rising (I would learn we call this post-holing, as each foot makes a post-hole in the snow), a sense of fear began to stir in me. I noticed Rigby was leaping just to make forward progress. We were in the middle of nowhere, and ten miles from the car. There was already a LOT of snow on the ground, and it was continuing to come down…hard.

I decided to fold and tuck tail. I struck camp and started to head back. I felt a little sad about this, not wanting to waste my time away, but it was beginning to dawn on me that I just MIGHT be in over my head. Rigby didn’t care. She was just happy to be in the snow. But soon, within an hour of fighting through rapidly accumulating snow, we were both exhausted. I began to realize the seriousness of the situation. It took us one solid day to hike in…it was going to take us many more to make it out. And that’s if we were lucky.

I grew up on video games. When I was a boy I played Donkey Kong Jr., Galaga, Pac Man, and Pitfall Harry. If you didn’t make it given the number of lives you had…you could always just start over. And I loved this sense of never ending abundance and possibility. When you tried something and failed, then you needed to get up, dust yourself off and try again. Video games, while maligned for being mere time wasters, build an incredible sense of resilience in us. Game designer, Jane McGonigal is so right when she writes that no one has the kind of perseverance, willingness to risk, fail, and try again as a gamer.

But, along with resilience I also realize I sometimes have a disconnection with the realness, the giveness of the world- the reality that there are limitations in life, endings that are final, and no reset button to be found. When I think back to trudging through the rapidly accumulating snow and that it took three days to travel just ten miles, it hits me again there was no way to out think or talk my way around that situation. I also couldn’t pretend it wasn’t really happening. It was. And there was nothing I could do but to keep putting one foot in front of the other.

I post-holed straight into what David Whyte refers to as coming to ground. I encountered the fundamental, inflexible, uncaring stubbornness of reality of the world. It’s what he experienced when he led a group in Ireland to witness this face in the stone, carved by an ancient hand. There was an immovability in the stone, as he puts it, staunching the need to leave by going nowhere. Whyte was encountering the fundamental otherness of the world around himself, an irreducible “isness” that he couldn’t access, alter, or rearrange. He could only stand in awe before it, allowing himself to show up as solid and as real and willing and able to be touched as that face in the stone.

When I was in Austin I remember my incredibly wise colleague, Fred Morgan, tell a group of seminarians that ministry was about learning how to be impotent. Yep. Impotent. While I watched the men in the room nervously shift in their seats, the women were feeling anxious, too. No one likes feeling powerless. What Fred was telling them was that the most important thing they could ever learn is that our job is to walk with people as they face situations no one can change: the slow motion train wreck of a divorce, the tragic spiral into addiction; the death of a child. Our job, our calling, is to abide with people facing these immovable, unchanging realities, and, as Whyte puts it, to show up, as solid and real and willing to be able to be touched as these events.

I made it out of the Middle Santiam Wilderness. Since then I’ve travelled through other kinds of wilderness with different people. I used to believe Woody Allen was right when he said most of life is just showing up…but now I would add that it isn’t enough just to show up. Life means showing up in the moments that just will not be budged with our games and strategies, and being willing and well able to be solid, real, vulnerable, and willing to be touched.

What isn’t moving in your world no matter how hard you’ve tried to push, pull, and cajole? What just isn’t changing? Maybe this is invitation to come to ground, to show up as well as you can, and just be as real and as present as you can possibly be?