Effort, Force, and Heaviness

“A secret turning in us

makes the universe turn.

Head unaware of feet,

and feet head. Neither cares.

They keep turning.”

-Rumi

We stood in the forest with its scrim of nocturnal eyes and wanderings. All senses engaged: the cicada and whip-poor-will song, the earthy scent of humus, the rubbery taste of lukewarm water from a hydration bladder, the humidity revealing its mist in the glow of our headlamps, and its dewy rest upon our skin and gear as we gingerly hiked up a mountain in the Blue Ridge darkness.

But it is another sense, often not taught or regarded, that encapsulates all the others—is the most fundamental element. And in such darkness, it is most crucial. I saw this sense in the spiders’ ligaments navigating the forest floor. I saw it in the terrestrial snails, embedding their periwinkle shapes into the curves of stems and sleeping flowers. I saw it in the pine’s roots peeking from the trail’s relentlessly upward terrain. I felt it when the feathery moth fluttered into my opened mouth and back out without touching my lips:

Proprioception,

or let’s just say,

the understanding of

where your

body

is in

space.

Per usual, I had the late poet Mary Oliver on my mind as I ascended the mountain. Whenever I am loving wildness, I am loving her. I do not recall Mary describing much body-intensity beyond carrying a heavy, dying turtle along a beach or briskly following her beloved, ecstatic dog through New England and Virginian forest-scapes. She was a saunterer, walking saint-like through her landscapes, birds landing on her hand, playing Mahler’s saddest compositions for the mockingbird, and knowing what the fox says.

My hiking partner, Maddie, and I plugged along up the mountain, destination sunrise. She led the way, demolishing the spider webs as I ambled slowly behind her, quietly singing to myself,

The way one feels could be likened to

an opening,

or a slamming,

or a grieving heart.

All of them

have seen inside my mouth.

Have grown

and flown

south.

All of them

I’ve pushed into the air.

All of them

will be with me

when we are safe

in the salty caves.

-Mountain Man (“Mouthwings”)

So badly I wanted to stop for a moment and if I were alone—if my body and processes were not relative to another’s—I would have. To do what? To turn off the headlamp and just be in the dark. To squat on my haunches and listen. To open and close my eyes for the difference. To see if darkness would teach me where I really was more so than when there was a shadow cast from me.

But the constant push in silence and hushed, airy singing paid off. We had arrived to the knob of the mountain—its highest point—as the sun began to stretch her arms in waking. At first, she was hidden in blankets of clouds but she very quickly pushed them off her bed and they undulated on the valley floor below us.

It was…every definition of lux, light. We watched her until everything in front of us was silhouette.

The nuances of the trail were revealed as we hiked back down the mountain in golden, misty light. A significant foot injury two years ago rendered me slow and deliberate when heading down mountains. My eyes gazed downwards, mindful of where to place my feet. It was when we passed a previously unseen tent and shelter that we felt as if we had never been on the trail at all. Hours before, the tent, the shelter—they may as well have been grisly predators, for we didn’t see them at all when coming up. It was as if the mouth-moth never happened. As if the whip-poor-will, the spiders, the snails, they never happened.

I thought about how Mary, throughout her life and especially toward the end of her life, read a lot of passages from Rumi, a 13th century Sufi mystic. He is known to be the poet of turning and would turn or dance as he recited his poetry. He moved his body eloquently in a dervish through physical space, in tune to hammers falling or water dropping. The word ‘dervish’ literally means doorway and what is movement but the limbs and body—aware of its flailings and footfalls—moving through a vast doorway, sometimes encumbered with obstacles, and sometimes not?

At one point during the hike down the mountain, a tree fruit fell directly onto my head and lodged in my hair. I felt struck, as if on purpose, but the limbless fruit was only an object of succumb. My limbs, they stretched downward, picked up the fruit, examined it, and I commented on it. Maddie said I should keep it as a memento, but I threw it through the open space that was the trail behind me.

That evening as I wrote in my journal, I promised to slow down, observe, and take joy for the sake of my wandering, turning saints.

The next morning, we awakened slowly. I opened my eyes and watched a spider linger above me along the netting of the tent. I moved my limbs about, finding a new temperature, stirring my blood. I eventually stood which is no automatic, easy task for one whose foot is a disaster. I limped around until my foot loosened from its stiff, supine routine. Soon enough, we were off to the next trailhead.

After a gentle descent into a riparian zone perfumed by cow pies, we crossed stream and field to enter the forest at the base of the mountain. My thoughts clung to I’m doing this, I’m feeling this, my feet are moving forward, my arms are grazing towering plants I cannot name, my eyes are seeing flowers I want to know. We passed more terrestrial snails, a carnival of wildflowers, one of them being the six-petaled blackberry lily with its yellow complexion and pink leopard spots. Maddie and I stopped often to admire, photograph, and query. I was jubilant, thinking about Mary and her delight:

“and I am the hunger and the

assuagement, and also I am

the leaves and the blossoms

and, like them, I am full of

delight, and shaking.”

-Mary Oliver

The body is in a constant consciousness of its effort, force, and heaviness. The body’s ascent against gravity is also this consciousness. The sweat, the opening of the lungs, the strain of the quads, the body’s thirst. The body’s ability to balance is no act of magic but one of equilibrium and consciousness. As in awe of the trail that I was, I was also in awe of how my arm extended to add balance during a precarious step. To crouch down on my haunches and observe, the only parts of my body touching the Earth were the balls of my feet on the forest floor and the tips of my fingers bringing a stamen closer to my face. I was in awe about how deeply ingrained I felt in the Earth even though the physical act of hiking up the steep mountain had me on only the balls of my feet, touching this rock or that tree from time-to-time. Perhaps I should lie down and really feel it. Perhaps put some leaves or dirt over my body. Dirt over my body. Dirt. Over my body. Over my body. A cadence arose from those words, and I walked to them.

Over my body, over my body, over my body. We all turn to dust.

I thought of my sister Mandy who is now dust. A pocket of dust at my bedside. A vessel of dust in my parents’ home. At this point, the trail intersected with the Appalachian Trail, became steeper, began to switchback. We were getting closer to the 250-million-year-old limestone cliffs that towered over the valley. The act of breathing heavily is synonymous to sobbing. So not to sob, I bit my tongue, commented on rock cleavage, focused on the heaviness of 250 million years.

Eventually, we were atop the limestone walls we were not long ago caressing as we passed. I remember wishing for water to soak my head wrap. The hot was claustrophobic on the exposed cliffs. Warm, sandy puddles were gathered in the curves of the limestone floor below us and I dipped my wrap in one pathetically as Maddie, sprite-like, wandered from cliff to cliff with curiosity and glow. I felt emotionally drained and lagged behind for a moment to check myself. I stood for a moment wishing that Mandy was with me. But then I remembered that Mandy would never do this. This isn’t something Mandy would do. This isn’t something she would enjoy. I tried. I tried. She wouldn’t do this. No, this isn’t something Mandy would do. Mandy would never want to do this. Not with me. Or anyone.

My mind was turning, and turning, and turning like Rumi to his hammers and his falling water. I always thought it was interesting how his name is in the word ruminate—to chew the cud, to turn it over, and over, and over in the head. Keep walking, Rumi once said, though there’s no place to get to. Don’t try to see through the distances. That’s not for human beings. Move within, but don’t move the way fear makes you move.

So far on this hiking trip, I had stood on several cliff edges, unafraid. So casual. My mind was aware of where my feet were. My mind was aware of where the seat of my pants were as I sat, feet dangling, above the forest canopy. I trusted the millions-year-old Earth below me as if it were a limb extended from my body.

I eventually found Maddie as she was shooting the breeze with a backpacking couple. While we relaxed on the limestone, I accidentally called her Mandy and quickly dismissed it. Maddie took a Polaroid of me as I sat on the cliff’s edge. In the picture, I looked calm. I looked as if I didn’t make room for anyone else.

I briefly thought about something I had recently read about mountain climbers. Lionel Terray called them “conquistadors of the useless”. Heaving one’s self up a mountain by foot or tool, just to say one did it. The older I get and the more I photograph and document, the more I understand the futility of it all. My passion for what I am passing and on what I am passing has healed the futilism of the hike for me. The less it is about me, the more it means to me. And yet it is all about how it makes me feel.

The process of coming home has been wearisome. The drive up the Appalachian valley and half way up the spine of Penn’s Woods was a source of stress that has left my body fatigued, my head pounding, my stomach sore, and my nerves raw. I have been on-edge and tired all week. And not the kind of edge that is made of limestone. I nearly blacked out from a panic attack at a stop light. The limbs of my mind are askew and can’t seem to gain their balance and equilibrium. And it has outsourced to my own car that was hit today as I casually drove by my aggressor. After a man accelerated into the side of my car, I parked and processed. So badly did I wish that stepping out to assess the damage was stepping between trees onto a pine needle carpet to assess a chewed-up pinecone.

I’m here, I’m here, I’m here. This happened. It happened. It’s real. I’m here, I’m here, I’m here.

And who was it—Sylvia Plath, Emily Dickinson?—who quoted the effort, force, and heaviness of their troubled, beating heart:

I am. I am. I am.