Honey Melon HikerChick

Hiking with a monkey

The nature writing genre is replete with glowing accounts of spiritual epiphanies gained out “in nature.”  Magical misty mornings, spiritual solitude, life lessons learned during tough climbs, serendipity in meeting and making a friend, or helping a stranger.  All of these things happen out there.  There is a real spiritual component to trudging through the wilderness – it cannot be denied.  

I’m here to provide an honest exposé of another side of hiking.  Yes, there are moments of bliss and oneness with all that is: read someone else’s blog to hear about that.  I am here to share about those other moments that occur in vast quantities.  90% trudge, at least.

Imagine, if you will, hiking with a monkey.  You can leash your monkey or let it run free.  Either way - it makes very little difference.  You set off, your monkey climbing all over you, running off into the woods, running back to your side, climbing up your legs like tree trunks, getting stinky monkey paws in your hair, and so on.  Excited by the new surroundings, sights, and smells, your monkey is unstoppably active – until it realizes that this is the Catskills, not the tropics, and there are no banana trees, no yummy rain forest fruit, and no awesome cockroaches the size of a small Buick.  Aah, the Catskills: it may be summer, but most likely it is cold and raining.

Your monkey starts entertaining itself by abusing you.  First all the taunts: “This is boring.”  “This is annoying, not peaceful.”  “This is hard.”  “This is taking too long.”  “This is work.  You do this for fun?”  “You’re tired.”  “You’re not enjoying this enough to spend a whole day out here.”  See?  Your monkey zeroes in on your weakness, and makes increasingly insightful assaults.  “You aren’t having a spiritual experience yet.”  “You are not mystified or blown away by being out in nature.  You are just here, thinking about other things.  You could be home doing the same thing.”

Or perhaps your monkey starts throwing acorns (or worse) at you: “I’m hungry!”  “I want to go shopping!”  “Your teenage son is contemplating raiding your liquor cabinet right now because he knows that you won’t be home for hours.”  And so on.

Your monkey is mean and your monkey is smart.  At this point, it will shut up for a little while – long enough to lull you into a false sense of triumph over monkey-mind.  You walk along lost in your own thoughts, or perhaps you stop to admire a view or some exquisite fungus.  You look, and you are in the moment, in the zone, without self-consciousness.  A sitting duck.  Your monkey whispers “Let’s go.”  That’s it.  Just a tiny, well-timed suggestion of impatience. Now you can take over.  You no longer need your monkey to yell at you, throw poo at you, torment or distract you.  The seed of doubt is planted and you do the rest.  “I’m not really good at this spirituality stuff.”  “I don’t really get it, I just pretend to.”  “It’s not just monkey-mind.  I really am kind of bored with all this looking at trees and rocks.”  “I want more bang for the buck.”  And so on.

My solution is to decide to try to enjoy my monkey’s company.  Sometimes I even try to out-monkey my monkey, singing show-tunes as I bushwack through prickers or indulging in OCD-style mathematical calculations, like figuring out how many footsteps I’ll take to get back to the car.  Mostly I just hang out with the little brute letting it pick at the dog hairs on my fleece pullover, and hide (or squish) some yummy treat on the bottom of the pack.

I take my solace in the notion that I am the driver, and I have the keys.  I’ll decide when we leave and where we go next.  My monkey may be a jerk, and a real pain in the neck, but it’s my monkey, and I have to accept it.  I can’t get rid of it, I can’t control it and I can’t kill it.  Spending my hikes fighting with it, trying to pretend it isn’t there, or stubbornly ignoring it doesn’t make it go away.  Some things just are, and the fact that I hike (and write and cook…) with a monkey is one of those facts.  May as well move over and make room ‘cause this little bugger is coming along.  

But every now and then I slip out while the monkey is still sleeping, and hike unencumbered.  Those hikes stand out in high relief, touch-points to return to, to remember.  I don’t believe that all those other nature writers that romance the spiritual hike without a monkey all the time.  I think that they just write about the times that they ditched the poor creature.  Yes, it is different, and yes, it becomes possible to experience deep and profound moments without a dirty paw tugging at your sleeve, and the equivalent of your three year old doing the pee-pee dance at your feet.  But the jury is still out on whether or not it’s better.

Posted by halia466 at 12:32 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

I guess it’s official: Yoga and I broke up.  It was a long time coming, and it is perfectly amicable, but to call a spade a spade – it’s over.  The axe has fallen.

We were together a long time.  Childhood sweethearts, we survived those tough college years, and our relationship got even stronger throughout that post-college decade.  We had good times, plenty of them.  Our physical relationship was amazing.  I’ve never had better.  Yoga was kind but firm with me, guiding my body into shapes and sizes previously unknown.  My arms and back looked like a rock climber’s.  I had permanent four-pack abs, and when I wasn’t suffering from PMS bloat, a six-pack.  I reveled in our physical relationship, equating all that body-ecstasy with real depth of connection.  I became a teacher, training for a year with magical Yoga orgies of 8-hour days on the mat.  We had a deep, passionate connection, neither one of us could deny that.

But things changed.

There were irreconcilable differences.  I wanted to go outside; I wanted to go fast; I wanted to be competitive.  Yoga wanted me to slow down, to breathe, and meditate.  I itched to get my workout outside; the studio smelled of Nag Champa incense and other people’s feet.  I wanted an aerobic component to my workout, and I wanted to bring my dogs.  Yoga just couldn’t keep up with all my demands.

Cheating starts with a thought.  A belief, perhaps, that you aren’t doing anything wrong, or that you won’t get caught. I started running after class, and hiking on the weekends.  Of course my body betrayed me: leg muscles ever tighter, it became increasingly clear I was taking my workouts outside, without Yoga. 

From that point on, I was critical of Yoga.  It was too commercialized: back in the 1980’s, I don’t think I owned even one mat, and don’t remember needing one.  At the time of our split, I think I owned three, plus a set of blocks, a strap, a blanket, a bolster, and so on.  I still have a few pair of Yoga’s pants; I gave away the last of her tops with the last bag of clothes headed for Goodwill.

So we broke up.  We still catch up, every few months or so, for an hour or so.  “Just checking in, how are you?”  “Fine, fine; all good.”  Maybe it isn’t really a formal break up, but just forging a new relationship – an open relationship – in which we can see other ‘people’ and not get all bent out of shape about it.  We shall see;  like everything else it is a work in progress.

Posted by halia466 at 08:17 PM | Permalink | Comments (4) | TrackBacks (0)

When I was about four years old, my mother explained daylight savings time to me.  I mulled this over on my own, and then came back to her with concern and confusion clouding my countenance.  “But how can we change the sun?” I implored.  The idea that we tell ourselves a convenient little white lie about time, and that we all, as a society, participate in this falsehood that somehow changing clocks changes time: what audacity!  What nonsense!  And yet, year after year, we all participate in this ritual.  I cherish the notion of an indignant little girl, defending the supremacy of the sun.

It makes us all talk of sleep.  Suddenly sleep is front and center, on everyone’s mind, on everyone’s lips for a few days twice each year.  We mumble “spring forward, fall back,” counting hours and preparing to be irritated or delighted.  We reset clocks, and get mightily confused when they reset themselves.  We fall asleep early and sleep late, and then compensate and wake up too early and start the whole pattern over again, since most of us are chronically sleep deprived anyway.

I’m a big fan of sleep.  Let’s face it – it’s my only opportunity to experience an altered state of consciousness.  It’s my last remaining link with primary process and the wordless richness therein.  I crave wordless experience (but that is the subject of another post); sleep refills that well.

From Honey Melon Fudge:

"With neither work nor worry to structure her time, Asha started sleeping.  She slept late, she took naps, she fell asleep after Pearl left for school and after she came home from school.  She slept the sleep of the dead, deep sleep, dreamless sleep.  She slept each night for many hours without stirring.  She slept each day, the afternoon nap beckoning her like a new lover.  She dove into bed with the enthusiasm of one seeking the thrill of new flesh, and she slept lustily.  She slept as one overcoming sleep deprivation.  She slept, and she dreamed of sleeping when she was not actually asleep.  She slept happily, delighting in her unconsciousness, her escape from thought and action.  She slept thoroughly and often, feeding her half-starved nervous system.  She slept hungrily, biting off huge juicy chunks of sleep, devouring them.  She took deep draughts of sleep, drinking it in, replenishing the reserves that had run dry.  She slept as one who had not enjoyed a good night sleep in about a year or so.  She slept as one finally released from the prison of anxiety, released from the tensed crouch, no longer awaiting the next onslaught."

Posted by halia466 at 01:05 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)