January was the month of Cascadian snowshoeing. February is the month of Southeastern desert. We intentionally fled two hours out of town for short spurts when I had the rare of occasion of a day off. The desert is full of s p a c e. The sky and the land meet at one clean horizon line. We sat in the warmth of the springs from the earth and felt the sun with those Scottish/Oregonian hills and mountains in the distance. I tried to capture the gradient of the sky, pulling off on the side of the road after we passed dozens and dozens of jack rabbits scampering by the road.
Someone recently told me that I have
the
right
to
take
up
space.
May I take up that space and use it well, and you, too.
Often we think of the wilderness as "out there," yet we all live in the wilderness - some areas of just more populated and built on than others. It may be more the world of humans that distracts us from that nature - the chatter of who the next bachelorette is (what?!), work stress, family drama, politics. There is that quote though, something about needing to spend time in the mountains in order cope with the world of people - escaping the chatter to reset and re-center. There is something about staring into the mountains that gives my mind permission to rest.
Jens Lekman has a new album, Life Will See You Now. I'm just listening to it on repeat until I memorize the words:
To have a dream A GPS in your heart A path to follow Through the dark Well, Jens says, "I write songs sometimes But they're kinda bad So if that doesn't work out I want to be a social worker just like my dad I just want to listen to people's stories Hear what they have to say" My friends say, "Just be a shrink then" But I don't know, I don't think I'll have the grades But in a world of mouths I want to be an ear If there's a purpose to all this Then that's why God put me here
(To Know Your Mission)
Another favorite, Hotwire the Ferris Wheel.
We went out for breakfast yesterday morning, and sat by the fire pit while waiting for a table, me sipping on my coffee and Baileys. The logs were smoldering and the fresh juniper scent was steaming up through the top. Though we may live in the wilderness, we don't always get to see it. There is something about the smell of smoke in my hair that reminds me what life is all about.
"Haha, look at your pants!" laughed one of the wilderness girls as I appeared out of the darkness, through the tall grasses, and marshes of the meadow. I walked towards her with my "cookie monster" jacket on (a blue fluffy jacket), headlamp beaming out of my forehead, and dressed in red, white, green plaid pajama pants. Navigating a tornado of a crisis at the moment, I had forgotten that yes - I was romping around a meadow, in the dark, still wearing my pajama pants.
"I was all nice and cozy in my sleeping bag, staring up at the stars, when I heard the sound of footsteps running on the road and saw a head lamp go by."
That signaled a turn of a events.
"Unconventional" is one way I could describe moments out in the field. After that: "raw", "fragile", "rich, & "magical". Hearing myself explain the situations we find ourselves in, I can find myself laughing, bewildered, fearful and at times wanting to let all the thoughts in my head explode for just a second. There are extremes of joy and fear we encounter; vulnerable moments we traverse together. Pajama pants reflect the immediacy of our attention and concern at times.
Recently, the same client mentioned above challenged us to write a rap about "Therapy". I don't listen to rap very often, but above is one of my favorite rap songs (perhaps a softer rap). Thank you, Frank Ocean. The live version is a bit different from his recorded one, but I like it because you can see his emotion. (I think this one also relates to some of the clients we work with in the field.)
She said that we would probably write "Therapy is blah blah blah". I can't say mine is a true "rap" - because I don't have a beat yet (for one). I think it's a mixture of myself, inspired by this girl, and thoughtful of therapy. Here's what I came up with:
My face smiled
inside of my mother
for nine months I grew
pushing, squirming, kicking -
moving - rearranging herself
making room for myself
pain connected ourselves -
until the final cut.
I breathed as my mother’s face lit up,
sparked by my cry -
I wish I could remember.
Up we grew -
my parents did, too -
they watched me walk
heard me talk
while my feelings hide
I laugh and I cry -
looking for a place for me
to cut myself free
and decide who I am
and am not meant to be.
I’ve built wall after wall
keeping them out there
as I stay close to me
I want to get out -
I can’t see
why I’m here
no one seems to care
wish I could remember -
what good is it to share
I feel pain I hope means I’ll be born
into something new
I’m trapped in this body, and -
I don’t know what to do.
I want someone to listen -
to listen and hear -
to the words
I’ve got to say
I just want to say
be tied to you again -
let me breathe. Often we talk about how sharing vulnerable moments in the field is an honor. It was an honor to hear this girl's rap; it was amazing. And when I read my own, I felt honored that she liked it and sat cross-legged, tying up a blade of grass, seeming comtemplative. I thought about how music, poetry, art - these creative movements - can communicate more deeply than words in a normal sentence seem to be able to do. The-rap-y.
One of my friends said one time, "I love how when you refer to 'the field' you actually mean a field." This is what it looks like, or can look like, in Wilderness Therapy. This is after a torrential downpour came through. The red dirt floor of the shelter, where we were running therapy sessions, turned into a swamp. Red muddy lanes of ditches filled the long road. Our dog's tail soaked up the mud and... you can imagine what came next.
And can the desert ever look as fresh as it does after a rain storm?
I came across this passage, in a book by John Updike, that I love, S. The forward contains a passage from Nathanial Hawthorne's The Scarlett Letter, which describes the main character, Hester Prynne. It's the intro, which I think relates to the way the girls out here come out of the wilderness:
"She was lady-like, too, after the manner of the feminine gentility of those days; characterized by a certain state and dignity, rather than by the delicate, evanescent, and indescribable grace, which is now recognized as its indication. And never had Hester Prynne appeared more lady-like, in the antique interpretation of the term, than as she issued from the prison. Those who had before known her, and had expected to behold her dimmed and obscured by a disastrous cloud, were astonished, and even startled, to perceive how her beauty shone out, and made a halo of the misfortune and ignominy in which she was enveloped." (p. 1)
In some sense, that's what the girls look like when they leave,"characterized by a certain state and dignity" after, perhaps, being caught up in some sort of "disastrous storm". Scarlett letters get burned in the fire. That's what I love about the wilderness.
(A post from September 28, 2014 that I never finished)
I was inspired by a line I heard from an On Being podcast, something along the lines of perhaps happiness isn't always a pursuit, but sometimes we need to stop and let it catch up with us. I've found it hard to slow down in recent years, as there are always things that I feel the need to pursue: photography, travel, friendships, job, academics, or even just the nature surrounding me.
But today, I'm letting happiness catch up with me. I'm finally figuring out how to safely get the over 3,000 photos from the past 4 months off my iPhone. This has taken me longer than I would have liked, causing intense technological frustration. Thankfully, I went to yoga for 90 minutes this morning, which was a surprise to find when I got there, but welcomed. I organized my room a bit more, rearranging the haphazard organizing that occurred when I first moved in and I basically threw all of my belongings in drawers, on the bookcase and under my bed, not to mention stuffing all kinds of things into the my closet (my tarp from the summer is still bound up tight). My window is open and a warm breeze is coming through - probably one of the last ones as we are heading into Fall all too quickly. I've got candles lit and am thoroughly enjoying Lord Huron's Lonesome Dreams.
Another thing that's going on in the back of my mind, is that I'm reflecting back over the summer and the girls that I worked with out there for a couple eight-day shifts. Recently, Emma Watson gave a speech at the UN about her organization He for She about feminism, which I found myself resonating with - nodding my head at my iPhone as a I watched it. She talked about how feminism became such a dirty word, but all it means is to believe that women should have the same rights as men - that's it.
Now, I'm not going to focus on feminism per se, but I will focus on the girls I saw this summer. The girls who struggled with esteem - having to try and convince themselves that they were enough, worthy, and should stop trying to bear the emotional burdens of their families. The girls who constantly smiled and sought to rescue one another from their negative emotions, saying "sorry" for what was not their fault. To me, these are symptoms of girls growing up in a world where they may be encouraged not to be confident, to expect less, and keep on smiling. They feel shame for never ever being good enough and call boys who treat them without respect their boyfriends if they happen to text them back.
Recently, I was listening to This American Life, a story about a woman who was a federal regulator, speaking out about the irresponsibility of Goldman Sachs. It was a fascinating story, but what frustrated me most was hearing a recording of a supervision session with her boss, where he told her that she was "breaking eggs" and her "shoulders were too sharp" and she was "arrogant". What I wondered was if she had been a man, would she have been called arrogant, or confident?
I don't really know. But what I do know, is that girls are courageous, strong,beautiful, and smart. I think this is one of the reasons that I love seeing girls out in the wilderness, where their bodies and their personalities are accepted as they are and they have the space to challenge themselves. It's true even for me: I feel the most beautiful when I am the most dirty. We're talking I rub my hands and peels of dirt come off dirty. It's not the dirt that causes me to feel beautiful, but it's because I'm in a place where there is no pressure to be anything more than all my imperfections combined, because it's those qualities that make me who I am. It's not until I'm there that I realize the intensity of the pressures we walk around in daily that nudge us towards believing that we are not enough... and girl are those forces strong.
It is when I find my way back to that place of enough-ness (often a tricky place to find) that happiness can catch up with me. Here's Lord Huron's Lonesome Dreams and some drawings from my time out there. Enjoy :)
"She was standing at the periphery of her own life, sharing a fridge and a toilet, a shallow intimacy, with people she did not know at all. People who lived in exclamation points. "Great!" they said often. "That's great!" People who did not scrub in the shower; their shampoos and conditioners and gels were cluttered in the bathroom, but there was not a single sponge, and this, the absence of a sponge, made them seem unreachably alien to her (p.156).... There was something unquestioning about her roommates' lives, an assumption of certainty that fascinated her, so that they often said, 'Let's go get some," about whatever it was they needed - more beer, pizza, buffalo wings, liquor - as though this getting was not an act of money (p.157)... The world was wrapped in gauze; she could see the shapes of things but not clearly enough, never enough (p.160)." - Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, Americanah
Going out into nature feels like venturing into the "real world" and unwrapping the gauze of the everyday luxuries. This gauze can hold me hostage from experiencing how life really operates, causing me to feel an empty kind of captivity by that white noise of routine and sense of expectation of the present and future. With the students out in the desert, it seems that substance abuse is a response to feeling like they couldn't meet parents' expectations, coping with a divorce, a death, and wanting to escape their own memories and thoughts. Going into the desert is like going into the deep end, sharing emotions, digging up realizations, and working out who you are within the backdrop of the natural, unpredictable forces surrounding you. It is sobering to me; it is my therapy.
***
In the desert, there is so much sage surrounding us all the time. We walk over it, step on it, smell it, use it's branches to make wooden spindles and fire boards to bust a fire. To bust a fire, you need a bow (a juniper branch with cordage tied from top to bottom) which you lodge a spindle (thin, long, piece of sage wood) into by twisting it in the cordage. Then you carve a small hole in the fire board (a larger, round trunk of sage wood) in which you lodge the spindle and slowly move your bow bow back and forth, back and forth, backandforth, backnforth - faster, faster, faster - until, your spindle starts driving out smoke from the fireboard - more and more smoke! Faster and faster, until, you create and ember. You then place this ember into a little nest of dried sage bark and pieces. You move your hand, holding the smoldering nesting (with a fire glove on), in a figure eight motion, allowing the wind to potentially ignite that nesting, eventually blowing into it, until you finally see a flame. There you have it: you have made fire, without a match or a lighter, but with force, and with the help of some sage and juniper.
It's hard. It doesn't happen right away for most people and I don't even like the process very much! When a student gets a fire, they begin to tally them. If they get 15 fires, they can earn a flashlight. During introductions, students often include the number of fires they've made and miles they've walked. I've busted just one, with the coaching of two students. But this serves as a key metaphor out there for hard work and success - turning embers into flames.
"Ah, a Juniper berry.... Let the gin-making begin!" said one of the boys, imitating some kind of British-type accent, making me laugh, as he looked at one tiny periwinkle Juniper berry on a branch in front of him. He's been out there for 6 or 7 weeks, sitting with his thoughts, entertaining the group with his stories - choosing to identify himself as a drug addict, to his own surprise. Despite regular use and selling, he had never thought to identify himself as an addict, but more as just a high school kid and then college freshman. He took Honors Philosophy in high school and read the 1500 pages of Atlas Shrugged, similar to another one of the group members. Yet drugs had been taking over his brain and he has only now realized that he can digest more words of a book than he has been able to in years.
We walked through the sage to a dried-up lake bed to play Ultimate Frisbee and then Capture the Flag. The earth out there is so cracked, stepped on by herds of cows - and baby cows! - drinking from the small puddle of a lake in the middle, into which dried up cow patties and rocks are thrown. Afterwards, we sit under a Juniper tree where one of the boys begins to lead a group surrounding one of his therapy assignments to write a letter of accountability for everything he's done. Some of the others checked in, sharing their feelings, thanking us staff for the games, saying, "I forgot I could have fun while sober." Then the student begins to read aloud his letter, where he states everything that he's done that has brought him to this place - DUIs, lying, drinking, etc. Everyone listens and everyone gives feedback, noting areas where he could say more and areas where we all can relate. As we speak, we play with the earth, the cow shit, and the plants that surround us. We thank him for sharing and the group is closed; we head back to camp.
On the way back, I converse with another student - about his family, how he was bullied from a young age, how he owns three cars and crashed one in a suicide attempt, how he began drinking when he lost his sports scholarship. We get into camp and the dinner cycle begins. We begin by washing our hands and feet - I sit on a log using my pocketknife to clean up the backs of my heals which have layer upon layer of dried skin. I walk back to the fire, sit back in my crazy creek (outdoor chair) and watch and listen around me of busting of fire, boiling of water, cutting of vegetables - joking, reading, frustration, laughing - carving of spoons, writing, drawing... whatever it is that they are working on around me. I feel like life is fresh again - reduced to its most basic parts: relationships, surviving, and growing.
We are then left with the fire, as the night sky moves into a navy blue tone. We acknowledge the people and things that we love (family, yoga pants, the ocean), share resentments (the cold, addiction), people who need our amends, say what we did well today and what we could do better tomorrow - we share how we're feeling. Then we put our packs back on, walk out to the tarps in the sage and tied to Juniper trees that are serving as shelters. My co-leader picks up the guitar and starts singing Johnny Cash, Radiohead, Phantom of the Opera, and ends with a Cowboy tune that incorporates Coyote sounds. Four of the boys join us in the center of the sage stage, in the middle of the desert, and begin to do "ballet" - throwing their arms up in the arm, resembling a quartet of syncronized swimmers out of the water, finding themselves on the land - no longer drowning - high on life. I laugh and smile and laugh and smile, but don't sing - just take in the growing night sky and the shadows of the mountains and the sounds of play.
"Goodnight! And remember... Oregon....
(and this is where there is disagreement)
HATES (some yell)
LOVES (some yell)
YOU!"
I seal myself up in my sleeping bag, take one final look up at the big dipper, and bury my head inside. Goodnight, goodnight and goodnight to this crazy unpredictable world.
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