Follow Your Nose and Your Bliss

I went hiking last Saturday with eight strangers, a very real experience made possible by the virtual ties that bind us.  A group called The Mountaineers just puts a bunch of adventures on the website and you sign up, show up, and hope for the best.  Sounds like online dating from what I’ve heard but I’m sorry, that whole scene is just way too creepy for me, whereas a day in the mountains with random outdoor nerds you don’t need to kiss or impress, well that’s just a walk in the park.

One guy was the CEO of some company that does “tech enterprise infrastructure” which could be brain surgery or espionage for all I know, but he was wearing a watch-like gadget the size of a grapefruit and positively crowing – in a happy geek way – about how this thing tracked his every heartbeat and had maps, compasses, data and maybe meatloaf recipes or something.  Thing is, while he was looking down at his monster watch he wasn’t looking up at the trees. Maybe he’d go home and watch the video of what he just missed.

He offered to email me info on this thing, not knowing, I guess, that I’m the broad who still wears clothes from college. 

“Dude, thanks but no,” I said as we climbed up a sweet -smelling trail, “I’m happy my heart beats but I don’t need the details, and I never quite know where I’m going but somehow I manage to get there.”

My son Billy used to say, “If I knew where I was going, I’d be there by now,” and as for me, I live the best line from Alice in Wonderland: “Where am I going? I don’t quite know.  What does it matter where people go?”

My guru for living the wandering life is my former dog and always soulmate Chopper, just a hundred pounds of dumb love.  He’d trot through the neighborhood and it was like Jesus or the Pied Piper or something.  Little kids would run out of the house and up their driveways, “It’s Chopper! Chopper’s here!”  And of course, my dog would smile and do that coffee-table-clearing wag of his tail, loving all strangers and smells. Seems I’m really a black lab trapped in the body of a 60-something female who still doesn’t know east from west, although I vaguely remember something about where the sun rises and sets. Growing up in Philly who cared about directions?  Just follow the signs on the expressway and point your car to the beach. Not so in the Wild West.  The first time a rancher took me out to help gather cattle in Nowhere, Colorado he dumped me on a hillside with a horse and a dog and said:

“Go gather them heads from the arroyo and bring ‘em east.”

Seriously? What the fuck was he even talking about? What’s an “arroyo” and whose head is in there? But there was no time for questions and he roared off in his F-350 diesel truck, a perennial snarl on his face.  Rancher Jim – not his real name even though I’m pretty sure he’ll never read my blog – was a fearsome presence. When we’d show up at dark thirty in the morning for a breakfast of grits before work he’d stomp into the kitchen and you could feel his family’s collective shiver. He was ornery and miserable but I called him “Princess” as in Yo Princess, what’s up?  The first time I did this his kids damn near lost all body fluids but after a while they had to subdue their delight.  Jim let me get away with this. I’m not sure why.

On that rocky hillside with a mare named Thunder and Gus, a wiry dog the size of my shin, I was lost as a baby calf but so happy to be living my goofball dream of being a cowgirl. I’d watched Gus herd cattle and it was something to behold – this tiny angry heeler with his hair on fire, nipping at the heels of a 2,000 -pound bull, not taking no for an answer. Being small, you can move fast and get away with a lot (like the “Princess” thing I guess). I hopped on Thunder’s back and hoped to God or whatever that she knew east from west. Gus led the way, we found the herd and pushed them east.  Well, the horse and dog did the work.  I was just window dressing.

So, when offered a machine to strap on my wrist for data I defer, relying rather on my six or seven senses – the usual five plus my common sense and intuition – and it all seems to turn out fine.  After having cancer, I decided to listen even more closely to my body and let it tell me what’s good or bad, right or wrong, north and south – and try it - it works! For instance, whenever I’m looking for a job, which is almost always, if the title or job description makes me weak and tired I DELETE immediately. If a headline makes my stomach churn I won’t look at it and obviously, I can’t watch Trump because I’ll throw up. Somebody invites me to something, I wait a nanosecond to see how it feels before I yay or nay.  Easy peasy.  What the body says, goes, period, and like Chopper I’ll just keep following my nose and trusting my gut, although admittedly he made some really bad food decisions.

It’s fun to evolve into this deep-down trustworthiness in your own fabulous self.  What if you really listened closely to channel your Inner Chopper? I’m mean, the only path for Chopper is the one that leads to happiness; and he lived on that path because he didn’t know about paychecks and buying stuff, changing the oil in the car or finding daycare.  He didn’t even have pockets to put shit in and as for “relationships,” he was station WLOVE – all love, all the time.  He just trusted in the okay-ness of everything and knew that love would carry the day.  He followed his nose and it led to his bliss, every dang day.

You can talk yourself out of anything with the same old script (“He/she will be so angry!” “I don’t have the money,” What about my career,” “My parents won’t like it,” blah blah blah), but you’re losing ground when you do that, looking at the data and not the trees. What smells good? What makes your heart sing, your chest expand, and your feet jump for joy? 

That. Just do that. 

INTO THE WOODS

Last night I watched Netflix’s blockbuster Bird Box, the dystopian thriller starring Sandra Bullock as the hero, playing most of the role in a blindfold because whoever looks at “It” is driven to suicide.  She ends up in a cabin in the woods with two little kids, forced to travel downriver – blinded – to survive. 

This morning I arrived here:

This could be bad timing, huh?

I thought it might be “fun” to do a writer’s retreat after New Year’s, hunker down with my novel-in-progress, my journal, and sketchpad and just let that right brain go crazy.  A wild and romantic adventure that most women crave like a drug - 72 hours of uninterrupted peace and quiet in the middle of nowhere.  No hungry husband, angry teenager, or leaky toddler to tend to; no dog to walk or bills to pay. Nothing to do, nowhere to go and here I sit in my big woolen socks, an Eagles’ sweatshirt and flannel pj pants, wondering what the fuck I’ll do for the next three days.

It’s getting dark and the rain has started, tapping then slamming on the cabin’s tin roof.  Why do I do this shit to myself? Why do I keep putting myself on the razor’s edge one way or another, out on a limb, walking the gangplank blindfolded like Bullock’s pitiful character, too scared to open her eyes?  I should be on match.com, finding a male human to cling to, shopping some bogus “profile” to the sad sea of old mostly white guys who are now in my “dating pool,” or at least back home in the comfort of my 400-square foot studio in Seattle, where you can’t turn around without running into a cup of coffee. Comfort and safety, the evil twins of stifled growth and a stale life. 

My fears followed me to this remote cabin in the woods of Camano Island, obnoxious little gremlins that rejoice in making my insides quiver: what if the car breaks down? Really? Two nights and three days alone again? No wireless, nobody cares, nothing to do, a waste of time, what’s coming out of those woods anyway? And so on. People think I’m such a fearless broad but there’s no such thing.  Everybody is afraid of something, lots of things, and up until a few years ago I lived with low level anxiety thrumming like a noisy old heater in my soul, all the damn time.  So, I went down to the basement of my terrified little kid psyche and just blew that sucker up.  Fear just sort of pisses me off now, so I keep throwing myself into it because Philly bravado is good for something.  It’s not all about hurling snowballs at Santa and burning cars during the Super Bowl parade. Sure, that stuff’s fun, but it’s truly just preparation for the Big Show.

One summer my boys and I went to The Grand Tetons – a majestic mountain range whose name loosely translates (as they reminded me constantly) into “Big Breasts.”  We went whitewater rafting on the Snake River in Wyoming, which rages up to Class Five rapids; this loosely translates into “worthy of a pants poop.”  At one point, our relaxed and affable guide, a dude named Jim, sort of leaned back, and stuck in his oars in the water as he squinted into the distance.

“Hey folks,” he said casually, “We’re about to have a character-building experience.”

And up ahead we saw massive dark clouds, pummeling towards us like cosmic bowling balls.  There was nothing to do but enter into it, paddling like our lives depended on it which they did. We slammed into a biblical hailstorm the likes of which I’d never seen in Jersey, of course, with hail the size of rocks coming at us and we, hapless Jedi warriors with oars, exposed on a rubber boat.  It was character-building, alright.  I guess that which doesn’t kill you may not make you stronger but it sure makes you grateful to just survive it.  I like living.

But to be honest, lately I’ve been thinking about gearing down you know? Like what the hell, man, when can I just kick back and enjoy?  One: when I’m completely financially secure, period, which is going to be a while; and Two: maybe never.  I worry/fear that once you sort of fold up your tent and call it a life, decrepitude is waiting to escort you to your wheelchair.  Do I fold up my tent or, like the dying guy in the fabulous parable, just get out of my damn sick self, take up my bed and walk? Yeah, that one.

Another book is percolating in me; it’s called Something for the Pain and it’s set in an ER where people are always crying out for relief from pain. Of course, there’s humor and tragedy in the story but the moral is you can’t escape pain, period.  Drugs, alcohol, meds, sex, Netflix, food…. No escape. I continue to voluntarily place myself in places of “no escape” – like the northeast corner of Glacier National Park or the San Juan Wilderness or a cabin in the woods – so I can practice going through pain rather than running from it.  We try so hard to build our physical muscles while neglecting our psychic ones; I want to keep doing psychic bicep curls and squats, pushing my inner self so that when the shit hits the fan again (spoiler alert: it will), I won’t freeze and panic but stand there on my own two feet and find a way through, like the hailstorm on the Snake. Otherwise I’ll just live in anticipation of bad stuff, watching my life go by, just a passenger on a Greyhound, banishing fears to the basement of my mind where, as mushrooms in the dark, they just get bigger.

This evening I ended up knocking back a glass of red (which is my limit because I’m a tiny lightweight) and singing Tambourine Man with Bob Dylan, full volume.  Whose voice is worse, mine or his? A close call, but I was really just telling that boogieman outside in the hollow wind to go fuck himself or better yet, come on in you rat bastard, and listen to me sing.  That oughta kill ya.  I belt out my favorite part, and wait for fear to dissipate:

Yes, to dance beneath the diamond sky with one hand waving free

Silhouetted by the sea, circled by the circus sand

With all memory and fate driven deep beneath the waves

Let me forget about today until tomorrow

Guess what? As it turns out, there’s nothing to be afraid of. Shaking loose the right brain, and taking my blindfold off now.