Long Road to the Mountains
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Mountain tops are nice. The air is different. The view is spectacular. The setting often beautiful. It lends itself to a wider perspective, a longer vision. They are necessary. They are a spiritual reset that I need so often. The only drawback to mountain top experiences is that at some point, I have to go back into the valley. Rarefied air is great, but I can't breathe it forever.
So what happens when the mountain-top experiences become fewer and farther in between? In this dynamic two years since I "woke" up, I have had moment after moment of these timeless periods of feeling reconnected, seeing the longer view, experiencing the wider perspective, the eternal peace. They got so frequent that hardly a day went by that I did not have such a moment. It was glorious.
Now, I am looking at why I have fewer such experiences. To a mystic like myself, it is almost a painful sense of loss. That immediate, intimate experience of God is what impassions and emboldens me. The mountain-tops are where I wish to live. So the quest for an answer began.
There were valley experiences. More than usual.
Not to go into detail, but when a crisis or a problem comes up that seems to restrict, to limit the physical possibilities of life, I felt pulled off the mountain.
It took almost fourteen years to come to a point where, for the most part, I could balance all the axis of my life. I was conscious and actively participating in life. Challenges would come up, and for a while there were no mountaintops. Yet, this was a very short and temporary thing. The problems were within the realm of my experience. The tools I had to deal with them were at hand. It was familiar territory. Before I knew it, I was back experiencing those timeless moments of connectedness. In fact, more so after the crises.
A brush with mortality.
These recent crises were new. They involved another set of balances to be added to my life. Too much one way, and now instead of getting to a place where I was physically uncomfortable and temporarily limited, these felt more serious, more life and death. To put it simply, I re-experienced my own mortality. I knew again what it was to look at the possibility of a limited time on earth.
Forgetting to look outward
With these new problems came the immediate reaction; I went back into survival mode. Survival-mode is a funny thing. In order to protect myself from what I perceived as outside problems, I curled back into myself. All this really does is prevent me from looking toward those things that can make me feel less threatened; connections with other people, friendships, the support of a community. The tighter I curled up, the less open I was to the very things that restored me before.
I even remember a time very similar, when the act of service to another (giving a stranger a 130-mile ride), broke me out of that time in the valley. Yet, why did I not do the same thing this time. Because I was curled up and watching my back instead of watching how I might serve others.
So, now that I knew the road-map I had, I could change direction. I could choose a different outlook, and if I didn't end up in the mountains again, at least I would recognize them when they came again.
Turnabout - Heading in a new direction is sometimes painful
So what turned me about this time. It was a moment of sheer physical pain. Again, I won't go into details, but that moment of pain seemed to shock my system awake. Things started moving again. This wash of emotions cam over me. Like a torrent, it blasted all this stagnant, survival-mode crash position perceptions away. It was an emotional catharsis. At one point, it was so powerful that once again I turned outward and fervently welcomed God, something larger than myself, to help me out. Though I was alone, I felt once again connected. As the tears stopped and the breathing resumed, I was again me. The me who experiences mountains everyday.
Since then, I have seen again the playful presence behind the laughing eyes of a dog. The sheer moments of loving-kindness between friends, the giggling of children, the peace of the birds in flight.
I realize these things never left. I just got caught in the self-sustaining cycle of survival and forgot and denied my life, or the living of it.
Yet, now I know there will always be the mountains, but that there will always be the valleys as well. And I hope that this long journey back will remind me again to hope, to persevere in the valleys.
