Long Road to the Mountains.

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.