We hiked upstream a mile or so - after a river crossing; Brindle loves to swim in cold wild waters, while Shasta more quickly picks her way to the other side - both, so happy to explore an area that is new to them. I've only been here a few times.
Last October was my last visit here. I met my friend -- there, and he was not happy. I was not happy. I had recently made him move out of my house in a fallout that was not unlike a flareup on a fireline, or a whole frickin' wildfire in itself. We'd been there before, the previous October,2007, and I remember we met in separate cars, as this past time, me coming from the desert and him from Riverside. Then, it was dark by the time we left, and he drove ahead of me and pulled out and lay on his car hood, watching the stars.
This past October, 2008, we decided to meet, for reasons unknown to either of us except to go out for a hike. We walked the short walk to the flowing water, and I was going more slowly, behind, recording footsteps for a film collaboration I was doing with the UCR-CA Museum of photography, eventually turned into a feature flick called "escape to reality: 24 hrs @ 24 fps." My friend walked ahead, and I finally caught up to him, sitting on a rock at water's edge. We didn't stay long before making our way to our separate cars, and I remember feeling pretty jolted and bummed out on the twisty road down to the freeway from the preserve. He raced ahead of me. Out of sight. It was the start of realizing that I wasn't as rich as I thought, that this friend was not as at-the-ready-for-me as he had always been, that the gold mine was running out of gold.
Today, on a spring day following a gripping, cold, moisture-rich winter, I take long, slow breaths, and forgive myself for mistakes I made then. It's Friday, March 13, and I walk alone, with the dogs, penetrating farther and deeper up the wide flood plain of Whitewater Wash, spotting a few budding wildflowers, and focusing on calming my recently so-frantic and fevered mind.
I understand this year, so far grown and moved ahead from last year, that I was a workaholic then, and didn't make enough time for someone I cared about. I didn't appreciate, didn't have the awareness I have now of what many of my actions and choices mean. I have learned and grown so much since even then, five months ago: it takes hiking alone, again, after months of steady companionship with this friend, for me to really understand the ironic but real: that a life of people, connections, and community, is what I crave and need - not just to overaccomplish, overachieve, excel and overdo.
I actually felt, in a dream state one early morning a few months ago, when I'd had a personal and highly private early morning meltdown of myriad confusing emotions: anger...stress....life.....frustration....loneliness....fear.....by, and I'm embarrassed to admit, dumping an entire shelf of books and swiping the top shelf, filled with jewelry, pictures, rocks and other oddities from many hikes, a general sort of decorative altar, across the room, before punching a few holes in the thin sheet of my bathroom wall. Crying for a long time, as I thought of the loneliness at the empty bedroom, the pain our friendship agitated into without recourse or relief, that horrible night with police in and out of my house.
Gone. Fucking gone. Leaving just enough things behind to find, while cleaning out the garage or a closet, and start the madness all over again. This time, though, Whitewater promises to purify and cleanse - though my eyes tear up a bit, as my mind strolls through that part of the fast-action-movie-blur my mind and life have become in months past....sharing a fair amount of space alongside the "other" stuff blasting like overamplified speakers at far-too-close range. I tell myself, my mantra on this walk: slow down, breathe, heal on the earth, walk in beauty, one...step....at...a...time.
Talking to my realtor friend today, who laid out the options: home mortgage restructuring (lower payments;) short sale; foreclosure; and, wise of him, encouraging me not to do anything too hasty or rash. Stressing out over the workload of my college job that feels so crunched up and impossible to face, particularly my online classes, with a new system, blackboard, that seems to be all screwed up - a better system than the old one, for sure, but having just made the switch this semester, halfway through the school year, on top of the other mind-boggling changes we've endured at the school, it's just too much - not to mention I'm teaching two classes online that I haven't taught for a few years, at a time when my life is already in nutty crazy flux.
The exhaustion, inevitable, from finishing a HUGE project of the past several years - not quite done, a few final tweaks, but 99% there, let's hope. The exhaustion and gaping, mouth-open disbelief of synapse-frying changes in just one short year, of the national mood we're all in, crashing in valleys we've collectively been hurled into by unimaginable avalanches of evil and greed that's been unbridled for "x" number of years, and the few, small fragments of sanity and balance I fixate on the way my dogs spot water from the top of the bluffs and mainline it down as fast as they can. Today, an afternoon of walking, breathing, praying, chanting, thanking, weeping, and focusing on the rash of orange poppies spread across one high hillside, a bright font of spring hope on otherwise barren slopes.
Fear of success. My therapist says to enjoy the journey I am on, as my life continues to move forward in the direction of my life as a writer, and a teacher of writing - creative writing. But it's terrifying to leave the shadow self behind, the self that was for years hiding behind the veil of "teacher" and "mom" and made a structure of that, one that enabled me for a long time to live a more unexamined life. Now, it's "me" and that is a lot to be grateful for, but it also terrifies. New territory, still chained by one ankle to the old, somewhat free, somewhat tied, and trying to calm down enough to pick the lock and figure out a strategy for letting myself go.
I thought I was alone - but encountered an elderly man on the way down, with an old Irish Setter - we chatted awhile, and I remembered the gallant male Irish Setter who was my family's beloved pet when I was a kid. Toby and I were very close, and he was my companion when I first began hiking - that was when we moved to Apple Valley when I was 13 years old, the wide, spacious desert, and I'd take off across the open spaces from our backyard and make my way to the top of a nearby rock mountain called Catholic Hill. And one day, my mother cried out in the morning as she looked out the front window - Toby, lying still on the side of our rural road, dead, hit during the night by a car. We all cried, my mom and brothers and I - dad? - for a few days on end, on and off. It was one of the worst losses of my young life, and I still want to cry now, thinking about him, what a wonderful dog, friend, companion, at a time in my life when I was such a geek, thought boys would never like me, that I'd forever be a nerdy girl wearing ugly glasses that my dad would glue with shoe-goo if they broke because we were too poor then to buy replacement glasses.
And likewise, today, I mourn other losses - love lost? Not lost from my heart, as I open my arms wide to the sky on that hike, and tell everyone I love them, even if they aren't here - lovers and friends who have come and gone - my love remains forever yours. Losses of people in more recent years, people who have died, family members of friends who have recently died - my heart is with you all.
And I also turn again to the hillside of poppies, and then to the water, and study the far-off hills. And I think of abundance and rebirth and the bounty that fills my life, to the extent that I am so overwhelmed I can barely cope most of the time these days - it's not from loss that I stagger about, it's from abundance - it's from so many good things that have come my way, that I can barely remember to catch my breath. Welcome this, embrace it, and calm the racing mind. I am here today with two wonderful dogs, Brindle, especially, a sort of replacement doofus Toby, thirty years down the trail of life - a terrific, beautiful, grown young adult daughter, many friends, although so many are so far away - caring parents and siblings and other family members - and a lot of colorful life memories - with more yet to be carved away out of the sides of my life's canyon hills.
Water down the center, towards the desert - but here, for now, in the slightly higher, near-mountains, I find cool relief and a moment's pause to hug all of it with my own arms to my heart. And when I stop into the visitor center, I make a new friend, one of the preserve rangers, and he's friendly and excited by my easy ability to connect the dots and remind him that I'd told the other ranger recently I'd love to do, as I did last spring, another poetry writing workshop there - have a poetry reading - and he says, "I've been wanting to learn to write more," and I feel my day is complete. I'm here too, today, to write a new story in my life's book, and there are empty pages waiting to unfold, and fill. Slowly, slowly, I am healing and getting a grip on all of this new overwhelm, in its terrors and its joys.
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