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Chronology is someone else’s problem.
I’m more a stream of consciousness girl. I’ve already told you about my motivations for going to Everest Base Camp – and then there’s the journey and the preparation for the journey, the gear, the must haves and the never do this.
Let’s talk touchy feely preparation. I knew from the beginning that my trip to Nepal was more than about a destination. In fact, the place was secondary in many ways.
Trekking is really just, you know, walking. A trek in Nepal is fundamentally the same a trek amywhere. You just have to walk*. One foot in front of the other. (At altitude, one foot will go very slowly in front of the other as you move up the trail at a snail’s pace in order to acclimatize.)
The best physical preparation you can do for any serious trek is walk. As must as you can, as far as you can every chance you get. The best mental preparation you can do is, well, walk. This is how I prepared anyway.
I love to hike alone. I like being quiet with my thoughts and a sense of peace and relief and freedom come over me. Surrounded by the forest, I feel grateful to be alive. I feel lucky to simply exist.
It was no chore to get outside and walk around for the sake of getting my EBC on. Every weekend for the last 4 or 5 months leading up to my departure for Nepal, I was outside in the horrendous heat and humidity of Arkansas. It’s a brutal time to be training with a heavy pack.** Despite the sticky weather, I found the quiet time to myself was a great way to center myself and a way to be open to whatever thoughts and experiences came to me.
So often my heart and mind on my walks turns to meaning. The meaning of wamderlust. The meaning of self-actualization. The meaning of existence.
It’s a gift to hear my soul gurgle up its secrets, its purest joys. Somewhere in the foliage and bark, I find something sacred.
Herman Hesse said it better than me:
“For me, trees have always been the most penetrating preachers. I revere them when they live in tribes and families, in forests and groves. And even more I revere them when they stand alone. They are like lonely persons. Not like hermits who have stolen away out of some weakness, but like great, solitary men, like Beethoven and Nietzsche. In their highest boughs the world rustles, their roots rest in infinity; but they do not lose themselves there, they struggle with all the force of their lives for one thing only: to fulfil themselves according to their own laws, to build up their own form, to represent themselves…
Trees are sanctuaries. Whoever knows how to speak to them, whoever knows how to listen to them, can learn the truth. They do not preach learning and precepts, they preach, undeterred by particulars, the ancient law of life…
A longing to wander tears my heart when I hear trees rustling in the wind at evening. If one listens to them silently for a long time, this longing reveals its kernel, its meaning. It is not so much a matter of escaping from one’s suffering, though it may seem to be so. It is a longing for home, for a memory of the mother, for new metaphors for life. It leads home. Every path leads homeward, every step is birth, every step is death, every grave is mother.
So the tree rustles in the evening, when we stand uneasy before our own childish thoughts: Trees have long thoughts, long-breathing and restful, just as they have longer lives than ours….Whoever has learned how to listen to trees no longer wants to be a tree. He wants to be nothing except what he is. That is home. That is happiness.”
Friends, you see now, don’t you? The truth for what it is.
I walked to Nepal so I could make like a tree and find my true self, to find happiness in being who I am. I trekked to EBC so I could come back home.
And even after all those miles, I’m still walking. ♡
_ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _
*So, okay, it’s not as easy as that. For one, you’re going to have to walk forever. Then, with the altitude, a trek in the Himalayas is no walk in any Arkansas state park. And walking forever every day at altitude is plain misery. You should totally do this. Really. This kind of misery will make you happier than you can imagine.
* *Okay, it was only a 20 lb pack but 1) I’ve never done any pack work so that was plenty hard enough for me, and 2) it was in the mid- to -upper 90s with high humidity. Stop being so judgmental!
I’d forgotten how hard blogs are. There’s a story to tell and I keep thinking it’s about Nepal. I should be writing about Nepal. I am supposed to be writing The Nepal Story, after all. So, why can I not write about Nepal?
Dramatic sigh.
I was once told by my mentor to trust my instincts when piecing a narrative together, meaning I shouldn’t be so arrogant as to think I can manhandle an experience if I don’t let it unfold. My story hasn’t even unfolded yet. I want to write a redemption story that hasn’t happened, so it’s no wonder I can’t write about it. Truth be told, mine is probably not a redemption story anyway. Deep down, I know Nepal as a requisite transformative experience will be dark because, when reduced to its smallest divisible parts, Nepal is all in my head.
And there’s a writer in there, too, who refuses to shut the hell up.
From a distance, a shadowed mirage is waving at me like a summer heat reflection on hot pavement and this passage comes back to me:
Despite our best intentions, we forget the dead.
Do they forget us? Jane Summer, “Erebus”
So. Leigh “Bindo” Binder*, if you refuse to die, I’ll just have to kill you off in a mediocre poem that’s an apology as much as a lament.
Sleeping Beauty
When the stem drooped and the petals died,
I slept
Sleeping beauty sleep
I awoke to gold
Light too bright
You offered me a dim corner
You and I shared caramelized melancholy
Like cotton candy
Adolescent sweetness, the things that grew in our heads
Restless dreams like your cigarette smoke
From a few thousand miles away
Choke me awake
Weighed together like stone
Bound and pull down like some English great, we weren’t built for this life
But mostly: Have we lived our eternity?
*Leigh Binder was a friend and fellow writer, who died two years ago leaving only his writing and YouTube videos (https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC-43KL2khFHhJ-LmRqA-y2A) to haunt me.
I’m dead with dying
There is an eye I refuse to catch
I was born with knowing
I look and I listen and I discern
I know
You’ve caught my eye
I’m not God
But I know
Tell me everything
The bile and the filth and the worst, pour it
All that will be left will be left behind
Listen to my knowing
Let me catch your eye
My knowing is a reflection
There’s no dream I can’t decipher
I simply know
You tell me what’s the matter
And that’s what’s the matter
A reflection
through kinder eyes than you can’t bear to see
This is my knowing
I was born in January
I am dead with dying
There’s an eye I refuse to catch
It’s the eye of a child
Who won’t let me see
Something terrible happened
Something awful and humiliating
Something that drained my blood from my face my screams from my throat my heart from my chest and
Something that puddled my potty down my leg and between my toes
Something terrible
And I don’t know
Something terrible
And I don’t know
Hollow now
I won’t catch my blue eye that eyes me in the mirror
I was a child born dead with knowing
It was January
It was cold something terrible
Something terrible
And I don’t know
there are no promises that can be kept
by gift we live by right we die
grace is optional
except when it’s not
the grace to bear grief
is sometimes always never
the only prayer there is
in these hot, breathless last days, it’d do us to get on with the praying
sooner than later
I’m a writer or something like that.
I will regain my status as a tap dancer soon.
I had a boy, lost a boy, got another boy. Loss pending.
I adopted a dog, adopted another one, and adopted another one (the last of which was in part due to my fondness of odd numbers, 3s in particular.
I was born. Death pending.
I got a degree, got another one, and am working toward the end of the third one.
I have a momma and a dad and a granny and a grandma and a brother and a sister in law, 9 aunts and uncles, and approximately 17 first cousins.
I have a doggie gate that I don’t understand how to install. I have no knowledge of an Allen wrench.
I’m cursed/blessed with tragedy.
That blamed bicycle stole my virginity when I was but a girl. Ouch.
I encourage people to save the world.
I have a history of passing out. For this reason, I should not give blood but still have the urge to because I could save your life, dear reader, because I have O-neg blood. I would gladly pass out to save your life. I might vomit a little when Bryan comes to pick me up from saving your life but it’s okay, only a little will get in his air vents.
I have kneecaps and calves of steel, though I might have just cracked my kneecap just now.
I love to read. Some favorites are the Year of Magical Thinking (Joan Didion), Young Men and Fire (Norman MacLean), Into Thin Air (Jon Krakauer), I Know This Much Is True (Wally Lamb), October Light (John Gardner), As I Lay Dying (William Faulkner), Angela’s Ashes (Frank McCourt), Devil’s Knot (Mara Leveritt), East of Eden (John Steinbeck), and my current read, the Spirit Catches You and You Fall Down (Anne Fadiman).
In Lady Antebellum’s “Need You Now,” one of the lyrics goes, “oh I’d rather feel something than nothing at all.” Well, then. Clearly, they’ve never felt the peace of feeling nothing at all because although not a pleasant experience, if you can get that numb, it’s something that one really would prefer at times, especially during breakups.
They need to get a little dead inside.
*****
Nails down to the quick
I’ve made them weak
with my neglect
I should have listened to the wives’ tales
I’m without talon to pick or perch
and it will take more time than I’ve got
to make them right again
Seriously, what has been up with my sporadic blogging. I’ve been writing but it doesn’t strike me as something I want to put on my blog. I’m working on a series of essays about different aspects of my family.
I have been going out with a much younger man, solidifying my cougar status. It’s been really fun, no pressure. And he’s tall. And I like his laugh.
I do have news. I’m a mother again. On Sunday, I adopted another dog, a beagle mix named Mindy IV who I’ve renamed Emmie (Val, your vote counted). I did adopt her in a manic phase and am now a little shell-shocked. She’s about a year old. I’m going to just say she’s one. She looks like a simple spotted dog mix with a beagle head attached. Beautiful eyes. Bryan loves her. I like her. I mean, she’s got so much energy and she seems alien and I can sense no emotion in her so I’m adjusting.
On Monday, happenstance occurred. Happenstance, I say, because I’m not sure I believe in fate or destiny, puzzle pieces fitting together just so. I see a yellow sticky note on my office floor. I leave it there for several hours. I have things to do. In the mid-afternoon, I pick up the note and take a look-see. I’m jolted to see it. His email, the asshole, who ruined the name Steve for me, although I never liked it anyway. The one with no affection for me. His email, who I’d finally forgotten. His email, written down a year and a half ago just in case we ever started communicating again, still waiting to be typed in my compose box.
He’s not much to me, not even painful to think about. He’s nothing. He’s an asshole. He is Steve.
He facebooked me a few months ago and I told him to never contact me again.
I’m not sure why I can’t bring myself to throw the sticky note away.
All about me.
In one word describe how you currently see yourself:
homely
One prominent nickname you were given:
ML or in my other life, Lo
One strange fact about yourself:
I hate constrictions of having to come up with one response when I mostly have several responses to questions, some of which are mutually exclusive.
One bad habit?
Not washing my hair often enough
One thing you can’t tolerate?
Wordpress monster avatars that appear as my picture on some blogs. It says it saves the new avatar but then the monster shows up. And the monster looks like he’s smiling. Like he’s a happy monster. Ugh. See Bindo’s site for my monster-faced comment.
What that sickens you?
Tidiness, rinsing with salt water
One thing you can’t forgive?
Bryan, for telling me there’s no hurry to complete his contest and then calling me every 5 seconds to see if I have selected a winner.
You have difficulties with…?
grocery shopping and bullets found in my door
What turns you on in a man physically?
Tall, hair on head, brain optional
What turns you on in a woman physically?
overalls
What is a turn off for you in a man physically?
A small oh-my. Short and/or without hair.
What is a turn off for you in a woman physically?
scabs
Have you seen the white light at the end of the tunnel?
I try to block it out with my sleeping mask.
One drink you’re never touching again?
Pledge-flavored herbal tea
How many countries have you visited?
A lowly 2 countries.
How many countries still on the list?
All of them, although I might wait a minute before heading over to Somalia or Afghanistan
One word to describe you a random friend.
Sevenlicious
One word to describe your partner.
N/fucking/A
One word to describe your latest ex.
Smelly
One word do describe your soul mate.
available
One word to describe your nemesis.
Sevenlicious
Your future in one word
freezer
You’re stranded on an island… One thing you’d want…?
liposuction
One word to describe this tag
time-waster
One thing you would like to say to the person on your mind right now
Wanna cuddle?
Ramblings of a Medicated Lady: Words of Woe by Loria Taylor 
Your Sympathies: