There are too many people on the trail today. Too many mothers out, seeking comfort and solace away from their kids, and all of the entanglements that is inherent in being this mother creature.
I don’t like sharing the trail with people. I find their presence an intrusion and interruption of my communion with God and nature.
I know I have no right to feel or think this way; nature belongs to no one and everyone at the same time. However, I find their intrusion into my solace, my quiet, disturbing. Their voices siren like in the dead of night, close by and deafening. Their presence alarming, disturbing, disruptive of peace and contentment.
I find myself wishing them away while simultaneously feeling that I have no right to feel this way. They too are out here searching, finding their own peace as they chatter amongst themselves, talking about life and relationships and love and mothering and jobs and weight loss. They speak of all things benign and not so benign.
As an only child, I think sharing has not come as hard as it has to some but sharing nature I feel particularly selfish. I want it for my own and I want to share it with no one. Well except for the limited and chosen few who are invited to hike the dusty trails, the stream beds, the meadows and the mountain sides with me. I mean I can’t do that with just anyone.
I’m almost to death's bench, which seems like a fitting place to rest and avoid the chattering cacophony of women walking.
So I take a beat and sit on death’s bench, the pleasant view of meadow and mountain side. It is dreary and wet. Not quite a rain but given our weather and drought conditions, we will call it spring time wetness, when anywhere else it would just be dew.
I find myself in this place. Re-orienting to myself and my life. I know these other people are doing the same but their loud voices and constant chatter bothers me. It ruins my delusion that one can escape from life. That one can move away from the daily living tasks and really exist in some other plane of existence.
I am sometimes one of these chattering women on the trail. Talking on the phone, to a client, my children or my mother. I can see now that even as I loathe the interruption, I am often that interruption. I am the person that I am so disturbed by today. And I am humbled.
As so it is with life and escape, mostly we do it to ourselves. We create the need to escape the very things we caused to occur in our lives in the first place. We then drag our distractions, disturbances and dis-ease out there into nature, the quiet and solitude punctured and ruptured by our own insistence that our lives are the most important. They are not, except to us.
And it is here in this place where I wander with purpose, the need for escape and solitude magnified most, especially when I cannot get it. And I see that it is most often me who I seek to escape from, not the kids, not the role but all that I think and feel about it. I create the conditions, I create the need to retreat. And so it is.
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