If you must know, it took me one hour and fifty-three minutes before I started to cry.
Let me back up. On a recent trip to Phoenix, Arizona, I hiked for three hours every day. The first hike was hot, but easy. The trails were wide and obvious. The second trail went straight up the side of a mountain, and my heart and lungs reveled in the hard work. The third hike was sacred. Rain released the scents of the desert, and a rainbow arced across the piercingly blue sky.
It was the last hike that pushed me over the edge. An hour north of the city in a scrubby wilderness, that trail was like a sibling who knows how to push your buttons, doing this, then this, to see how long before you start to cry.
What began as a jeep road soon turned into a cattle path before disappearing into a tangled and thorny wilderness that hugged a rushing, brown river, full of rain from the day before. Hiking became bushwhacking, and my boyfriend, who had been on this trail once before and who looks at life as eagerly as a Golden Retriever, had me lead.
I have two speeds in life—hummingbird or stone—neither of which I could use on that trail, at least not if I wanted to catch my flight back home that afternoon.
That left me doing the calculus of trying to find the goddamn trail while avoiding being punctured in the throat by dead branches, untangling my clothing from the thorny bushes and balancing on the boulders scattered about like giant’s teeth all while my shoes were slick with mud.
When he asked, “Isn’t this great?” I replied, “This is not my favorite hike.”
That doesn’t seem like the kind of exchange that would unleash a shitstorm of emotions, but that’s exactly what it did. There were more historical and emotional layers to my brief response than there were geological layers in the canyon’s walls, which is why I started to cry.
What led to my tears is less important than this fact: the wilderness reveals, as do meditation and yoga. The things that welled up in me so fiercely—the old wounds and the ever-present worries, the memories and the mishaps—were already within me. That trail, just like a yoga mat or a meditation cushion, simply created the perfect conditions that allowed them to surface.
Now, do I wish I could have just Zen’d my ass off and breathed through that moment?
Don’t you know it, because as soon as my cloudburst of tears finished, the trail cleared. Well, at least of the thorns. Next up was a wall of rock. Our only choice was to ford the river to get to the path on the other side. Suddenly, I had to face another fear—stepping into rushing, silt-filled water, filled with currents, drop-offs, and probably all manner of river monsters.
I wonder now if the earlier outburst didn’t help me take that first step into the wild and rushing flow. Same with all of my past hikes . . . and my practices of yoga and meditation. What are each of those except opportunities to put myself into challenging positions (sometimes literally) in order to grow and release? Each teaches me how to face the right here and right now with as much centeredness as I can muster, because sometimes in life, stepping directly into the unknown and the challenging is the only way forward.
I waded through the rushing current not once but four times.
And now here I am at home, days later, and my legs can still feel the push of the water, the freshness of mountains on my skin. I haven’t felt that alive in a very long time.
We can do everything in our power to make our lives like that first trail—easy. Manicured. Perfect. Like that second trail, we can work hard and be rewarded with the glowing pride of our efforts. We can seek out the holy, whether that be in rock, river, and rainbow, or in some other place that stirs the deepest parts of our souls.
We can (and will) sometimes fall apart, because our trail demands so much of us, pushing us away from comfort and into the untamed wilderness. When that happens, it’s okay to struggle and cry. It’s okay to be vulnerable and let our tendernesses be revealed, to hope they are honored by those around us (as mine were).
Then we can walk on, daring to say yes. Yes to whatever arises next on this bewildering and beautiful pilgrimage we call life.