Grace

To say that I feel grateful or lucky or blessed to be here does not cover it adequately. I am grateful that I feel grateful. I feel lucky that I feel lucky to be here. I feel blessed that I feel blessed. 

I think it could be called grace. I feel lucky not only that I am here, but that I have the capacity to really be here and take all this in. I think I’ve always had this capacity when it comes to wilderness. I guess it’s a gift I was born with. As a youth, I was always in a state of amazement when I was out on a backpacking or mountaineering trip. When I say really ‘be here’ what I’m talking about is presence, really paying attention. I mean looking at everything around me, enjoying the shapes and colors of the flowers and their unlikely delicate beauty as they grow among jagged, dry rocks with hardly any topsoil.  I mean stopping to really listen to the varied thrush and its haunting watery song, letting it seep into my cells. I mean noticing how I feel when taking in a view of a mountain peak.

It’s not just a mind game, it’s not whitewashing or sugarcoating. I actually love this! I love walking, I love being outside all day, I love exercising all day. I love sleeping outside, breathing the fresh air, and hearing the sounds of wind and birds. I love the mountains and high alpine vistas and views, and I also love forests, deep and dark, green and brown with light filtering down from above. I am never bored out here. Tired sometimes, yes. Hot also. Sometimes lonely, sometimes hungry, but never bored, and for this I feel grateful and lucky and blessed. This is not true for everyone. 

For everyone it took a lot of planning and effort to come to the Pacific Crest Trail with the intention of completing it. Many people have traveled from other countries and had to plan all of this from their home country which must be even more difficult. Still, I encounter people who don’t seem happy to be here. It’s as if they didn’t know they were going backpacking. They miss flushing toilets. They are tired of walking and bored with forest. They are extremely put out by mosquitoes and sometimes all they can think about is getting to the next town. Some people seem to be in a hurry to get this over with. I’ve met a couple people who have decided to end their hike because it was not what they thought it would be.

There is another group of people that have chosen to do this experience high. I’ve been pretty shocked at the amount of marijuana some people are smoking. But as I described in a previous post, accidents can happen out here, and I’ve got to believe being in an altered state does not increase one’s safety or decision-making capacity. I choose to be sober, and still I can’t wipe this shit eating grin off my face as I walk down the trail.

I am recognizing that I am exactly where I want to be, doing exactly what I want to be doing and not wanting it to go by too fast. It could happen that I have to eat these words down the line. I think rain could change my enthusiastic disposition quite a bit. Also, loneliness could take me down eventually, but not so far. Fires and smoke could take the shine off. But so far, there has not been a single day that I have not woken up feeling grateful and blessed to be in this warm sleeping bag inside my tiny tent and eager to get up, make coffee and go for a long walk. 

To have the capacity to know that I have been gifted with the capacity to experience all this feels like grace to me.