Day 138 - Big Sur Again.

The mountain is calling and today we go. I do not know why I am pulled towards this mountain, this area but I am. If I am away from it for too long, I miss it, like I miss a friend’s face or a lover’s laugh. Strange the things we keep.

So today, my daughter and I make our annual trek to visit this holy place. A place where I feel like I can breathe. A place where my life makes sense. A place where I gain information and insight about myself, others and life in general.

There are many places I get this. But nature is where my soul resides. Nature, always. I can feel my connection to everything there.

Cheryl Strayed said this:

Uncertain as I was as I pushed forward, I felt right in my pushing, as if the effort itself meant something. That perhaps being among the undesecrated beauty the wilderness meant that I, too, could be undesecrated, regardless of what I’d lost or what had been taken from me, regardless of the regrettable things I’d done to others or to myself or the regrettable things that had been done to me. Of all the things I’d been skeptical about, I didn’t feel skeptical about this: the wilderness had a clarity and it included me.

Yep. That about sums it up.

My retreat into nature, comes with it a stillness and quiet that I find hard to hold. I bring about it in my daily life with meditation but there is something about going to this one place every year that I find myself again. Different yet the same.

I review the year past, and the present. Who I was last year when I came to the mountain. Who I am this year. I can see the growth in my body, face, spirit. I can feel the passage of time in a healthy, progressive way. Feeling more like myself than I did last year. Like I have come into my own...again and still.

It is like the mountain teaches me things. How to remain. How to be still and let life’s elements hit you in their full measure. Never seeking to shelter or shy from all that happens around me. Here is where I come to remain. Here is where I come to honor the stillness. Here is where I am.

While my favorite way to come to this place is alone. I started bringing my daughter last year. I want to give her what I find there. I want her to see all that stillness has to offer. I want her to see that life occurs at lightning speed but her nature resides deep within and needs permission to be set free. Mountains are good for that. Mountains have lots of lessons that cannot be learned in other places. Mountains are never going anywhere yet are always changing.

I can’t wait to get there today. I can’t wait to breathe the air. Feel the coolness of the air. Feel the sun or the wet - either is fine. I feel the renewal calling to me. I feel myself being called back to the place where I find myself again.

I am so grateful to have this relationship with nature. This need to be in it. So grateful that it includes me. I give you this today...

Prose from the Mountain Top

I sit here in the affable sunshine, a top a mountain

I am awash with emotion and the breath of life

I came here to forget instead I remember

everything vividly with each step

It is here that I am present

Consciously aware of all that I am

How far I have come

That I will never know what comes next

I feel no resistance to this most basic and simple truth

My life most complete with myself when I am here