Tag: hiking

Beltane Tarot Reading

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Monday I attended a fabulous Introduction to Tarot workshop with Alice Tarot Queen at Full Circle Studio in Atlanta.

Last night, the midpoint between spring equinox and summer solstice, I tried my hand at reading the cards, and lo and behold, I drew three Major Arcana cards!

It kind of freaked me out a little, like how important is this moment?

My question was, “What insights do I need to decide about my future travels?”

This is a question I’ve been considering, and I’ve come to the conclusion after a focused free write that I want to return to Spain for another pilgrimage, but it’s not going to be this summer (unless I win the lottery!).

I’ve taken this semester off from teaching to heal from a second fracture in my right foot, and I’ve finally found a pair of hiking boots that feel comfortable. Looks like I’ll be hiking in the US this summer, though.

Here is my reading of the three-card pattern I used, representing past, present, and future.

The Sun, past

The Sun card represents joy, freedom, optimism, vitality. When I think about the most liberating and joyful days of my past travels, my first pilgrimage to Spain naturally comes to mind.

The freedom I experienced on the way to Santiago in 2015 was as big as the sky, even when my feet and legs ached and my clothes were drenched in sweat.

Temperance, present

Temperance speaks to me of healing. I’ve taken this semester off from teaching to rest my mind and heal my foot, which I fractured in 2017 on a second pilgrimage and later fractured again in the fall of 2018.

I couldn’t return to Spain last summer because I was still healing from my injuries, and when I increased my mileage, I had a second stress fracture.

Also, 2018 was a time of intense anxiety about the midterm elections. This current political climate has elevated the anxiety levels for so many of us elders. We want to leave this life with the peace of mind that the younger generations will inherit a just society that is working toward a healthy planet Earth.

We are connected to the earth. The Earth is alive, and we are part of it. The Earth’s health is connected to our health.

During this last year, especially last summer and fall, my mind was on helping with the midterm elections. I didn’t do nearly enough, but I made phone calls, wrote letters, and nagged my friends and family about voting.

Thankfully, Lucy McBath won in our district by running on a gun reform platform. Her election is a sign that enough people near me want to live in a safer, healthier world.

Wheel of Fortune, future

What a card to draw for the future! The Wheel of Fortune indicates karma, changes in circumstances, and fate.

I’m not sure what to think about my future travels when it comes to karma. What will be the consequences of my past actions when it comes to the places I go?

Some of my yoga buddies are planning a two-week trip to India for a yoga retreat with a well-respected yoga teacher in our area. But the trip is in November, and I might return to teaching by then. I do wish I could accompany them! If money were no object, I would.

I don’t have a strong desire to teach English Composition anymore. Adjunct professors are paid abysmally low salaries for the classes they teach. Read “Death of an Adjunct” for more insight. I’d like to find a different way to earn money, but I still haven’t found it.

So my future travels depend on many circumstances–finances, health, and time. After all of this thinking and writing, I am determined to return to Spain for another pilgrimage, but it won’t be this summer.

I’ll be traveling closer to home, hiking with my new boots on the beautiful trails of North Georgia.

A Day In the Life

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I just read an article titled “So You Think You’re Happy” that suggests certain activities that might promote a sense of wellbeing or contentedness with one’s life. 

One of the suggestions is to write a “day in the life” blog post as a series, which strikes me as just the thing. My life is fairly ho hum, so I have plenty of material for slice of life posts. Maybe I’ll learn to appreciate my quiet existence if I write about my days.

Lately I’ve been staying in bed until around 8:30 or 9:00 am, long enough for mediation and breathing to ease the anxiety. I lie on my side and look out the window for a while, and then I sit up and meditate in bed. I feel grateful for working part-time, which gives me the flexibility to work on my mental health at my leisure. 

The next step is to let the dogs out into our wooded, fenced backyard. Today S.A. did that job, which was nice for a change. I made coffee, sat in a chair near the sunny living room window, and read news articles for an hour.

In the afternoon I took Red for a six-mile hike at a local park. It was fun at first, but he kept tugging on the leash and wanting to sniff every single dog we passed. 

I suppose it wouldn’t have been too draining except I just had minor surgery yesterday for a skin cancer lesion, and I was in some pain still from the incision. Next time I’ll probably leave Red at home and do my usual hike with trekking poles. Today when we were going down some rocks, he pulled on the leash and I landed on my rump. Plus, I scraped my hand.

S.A. has been making dinner every Wednesday night, which I so appreciate. Tonight it was cod with spinach and lemon sauce served with zucchini and tomatoes baked in the oven with avocado oil. It was doubly delicious because he made it AND cleaned up.

While he was cooking, I headed to my office and wrote 500 words of the travelogue I’m working on. Usually, I try to write more, but I was wiped out from the hike up the mountain, even after resting for a half an hour. 

So, those were the highlights of my day, besides the ever-enlightening conversations I had with my sons and the books I’ve been reading. My daily wish is to gain insights and to better understand the people I love.

   
 

Today’s Walk

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I’m sitting at the top of Monument Mountain, the place where Herman Melville met Nathanial Hawthorne for the first time.

It’s a hot day for the Berkshires. I’m sweating in the muggy air, but a slight breeze refreshes my skin. This humidity is nothing like the pizza oven heat of Georgia.

While going up the mountain I took a picture of a log bridge–I’m a little afraid of crossing narrow bridges, even when there’s nothing but a creek below. So I took a picture to illustrate the obstacles I’m forever confronting.

  
When I went to look for my phone to take another picture, this time of the rocky ascent to the summit, I realized I had left my phone at the log bridge.

So back down the mountain I went. A couple had seen my phone in the ground where it must have slipped out of my backpack (or what is more probable is that I missed the pocket completely, dropping the phone silently on the pine straw and moss covered path).

While climbing back up to where I am now, I thought I would maybe start leaving my smart phone behind when I go on these long walks. I usually put my phone in airplane mode, and I don’t check email, but I do use it to take pictures.  

So here I am on the summit, thinking about Herman Melville and typing into a WordPress app. I read that the day he came here with a gathering of local literary types, it rained, and he spent a good while describing to Nathaniel Hawthorne the intricacies of manning a whaling ship.

The trail here is well maintained. The granite and schist stones form a staircase that allows the hiker to reach the top fairly easily, but I doubt the rocks were arranged so artfully when Melville walked here. 

The air was the same, the flora and fauna the same, and some of the views. From where I am now, I can see Monument Mountain high school, where someone has written the name Maia in large white letters on the lawn in front of the school. Even from this height I can see the heart over the letter i in place of a dot. Someone loves Maia. 

To enter the nineteenth century imagination, I think I would have to abandon iPhone technology for a while. I don’t even know how Melville would have traveled from his Arrowhead farm in Pittsfield  to Monument Mountain in Great Barrington. Horse and wagon maybe? I know he liked to camp and was an avid outdoorsman. 

He became depressed after Moby Dick didn’t sell, and he turned to alcohol. This is a lesson in not tying one’s ego to one’s art. I don’t blame Melville–he had to support his family, and he had wanted to do so by writing. Art and business don’t mix. Robert Graves said something to the effect : “There’s no money in poetry, and no poetry in money.”

   
 

Keeping the Camino Alive

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On a physical level, the best outcome of my pilgrimage is that after 22 years I have been able to go off anti-depressants. 

I don’t mean to judge anyone who takes SSRIs, not at all. We are all trying to figure out what our lives mean and how best to live.  

It wasn’t the Camino alone that helped me ween myself off them. I also had the help of a mind-body therapist who continues to offer suggestions for passing through anxiety and panic, the two main symptoms of the depression I have experienced off and on since childhood. 

If the medications work, then take them. But after more than two decades on various SSRIs, I had fluctuating blood pressure and strange head rushes that led to near fainting, symptoms that have now disappeared since I went off the medication. 

I attribute my peace of mind to the days and days of spending six to eight hours outdoors, walking and meditating. Even though the heat in Georgia can be unbearable, I continue to walk.

Each day is a new challenge in maintaining a balance of body, mind, and spirit. I’m tottering on a fragile tightrope of sanity, but walking and writing continue to be my medicine. 

   
    
    
    
   
Yesterday’s hike:

About 8 or 9 miles, from Burnt Hickory Road to Dallas Highway at Kennesaw Battlefield Park, then on to the visitor’s center and back to Burnt Hickory.

Creatures I noticed:

Dragonflies, ants, butterflies, various birds, including two giant vultures, a wee toad, about the size of my thumb pad, a chipmunk, many squirrels.

I stood still and listened to the cicadas in the trees and the grasshoppers in the tall grass. There was very little breeze, and the trees were still and silent, their leaves dry and weary from the heat. The noise from the highway and the passing trains at times overpowered the silence of the woods.  

It was a heavy, humid trek. I encouraged myself to keep walking by remembering the way I felt toward the end of my walks on the Camino–with sore feet and tired legs, I still managed to make it up those steep inclines. You can do this, I told myself. 

A Long Walk Might Be Like Drinking Ayahuasca

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In a comment on a recent post, “Why Go on a Pilgrimage?, “  Elissa from Sometimes She Travels  writes: In fact, one piece of Camino graffiti from last year that I thought about every day this year was, “What are you doing? Why?” 

It has been 24 days since I returned from Spain, and I am still processing how the journey has changed me. Once we begin a pilgrimage, we never truly leave it. It’s a spiral, a labyrinth that continuously leads us closer to the center.

In some ways, going on a very long walk seems to resemble a shamanic healing. Most of us have heard about the Australian aborigines’ ritual of the Walkabout. There are also the stories of Jesus walking in the desert for 40 days, or the Coptic Saint Mary of Egypt, who wandered in the desert a for lifetime with the hopes of purging herself of her “sinful” nature.

A pilgrimage to heal from the emotional wounds of life has a different goal, one that resembles an extended  psychedelic trip. Maybe that’s how I see it, since I spent a long part of the journey in a self-induced poetic trance.

Although I’ve never experienced an ayahuasca ceremony, after reading Kira Salak’s “Perú: Hell and Back,” an account of how her five ayahuasca ceremonies in Perú changed her perspective, I can say my pilgrimage has had a similar outcome.

Speaking about coming out of a great darkness and entering the light, Salak writes:  Little suspecting that I’d emerge from it feeling as if a waterlogged wool coat had been removed from my shoulders—literally feeling the burden of depression lifted—and thinking that there must be something to this crazy shamanism after all.

Salak states that her first ayahuasca rituals helped heal the depression she had suffered since childhood, but that she continued to experience self-doubt and fear, so she went on a second journey for further healing.

Like Salak, I have experienced relief from depression, not after taking ayahuasca (which intrigues me but may or may not be my path), but after completing a 40-day walk to Santiago de Compostela.

Also similar to Salak, who repeated her journey to Perú,  I am considering another pilgrimage to Santiago in the future. When I know the medicine works, it’s tempting to take more of it, and I’d much rather rely on a very long walk than the SSRIs I took for decades that I now no longer need. Maybe I never needed them.

Day 19, Calzadilla de la Cueza

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The town where I stopped today has a population of 50, if that. My plan was to walk 30 km to a hostel run by Italians that’s supposed to be very warm and friendly, but the relentless rain changed my plans. 

It turns out that my waterproof jacket is not at all waterproof, and I got soaked to the skin. Also, my boots are not waterproof, and my feet were sopping wet. 

There was no place to stop along the way for coffee or warmth, so I kept slogging my way through. I’ve never walked  ten miles so fast under such dismal conditions–cold rain, wind, thunder, lightning. 

All I could see were wheat fields and grey sky, with an occasional swallow or  sparrow darting across the wheat. 

A pocketful of hard candy got me through the morning. I gave one to an Englishman who was passing me, and he said, “Yesterday my feet hurt and that’s all I could think about. Today, I’m not worrying about my feet. It’s easy to walk when the sun is shining. Now we have to dig deep.”

At one point a sign in yellow letters painted on a bridge said, “Store, 6 KM.” When I saw a tower in the distance, shadowy in the rain, I thought,”Yes I can make it there and dry off a bit.”

My Dutch friend Andre said, “It was the Tower of Hope.”

But the tower turned out to be another kilometer off the path, and it did not belong to a town.

Another kilometer further and a hostel appeared at the edge of what looked like a ghost town–no people in sight except pilgrims in rain ponchos with backpacks like humps growing out of their backs.

Once inside the hostel, my hands were so numb that a young Australian girl had to unbuckle my pack for me to get it off. After I took off my wet boots and socks, I sat down to a huge plate of paella, and even though it was only 11:30 in the morning, I had a glass of red wine with it. 

At home I would never drink wine or eat paella so early in the day, but after that walk, I didn’t care. It was good.

So good, I decided to stay at this hostel for tonight. My clothes and sleeping bag are drying, and I’ll rest up for tomorrow. It’s supposed to rain again tomorrow, but I’ll take it as it comes.

Tonight I had dinner with a huge group of pilgrims that I’ve met along the way: a German couple and many French people. One woman, Jacky, speaks no English, so she chatters away with me in French. I understand one or two words here and there, but mostly I just nod and smile.

After all the walking we did in the rain, we were still fortunate enough to be in a warm hostel with good food and friendly people. I wonder what it was like for medieval pilgrims. Hopefully they at least had some bread and wine at the end of the day. 

A Spanish man told me this saying: “Con pan y vino se hace el camino.”

“With bread and wine the Camino is made.”  

 

Pilgrimage, From Kennesaw Mountain to Santiago de Compostelas

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When you decide you’re going to make a pilgrimage, you’ve already begun it. Every step you take is a preparation for the day when you take that first step on the desired path; mentally, in your heart and mind, you’re already there. It’s not that your mind is elsewhere, but that you have invited the pilgrimage into your daily life. Not only that, when you decide to go on this path, you make it that much easier for someone else to begin. We raise consciousness together, one person at a time.

In 2015, I’m planning to hike 500 plus miles across the north of Spain, from St. Jean Pied Port to Santiago de Compostelas. Emilio Estevez’s film “The Way,” starring his father, Martin Sheen, has recently popularized this ancient pilgrimage. Called el Camino de Santiago in Spanish, or el Camino Francés, in English it translates as the Way of St. James.

My reasons for making this pilgrimage vary. I was raised in a traditional, Catholic family, although I am not a practicing Catholic. Maybe because I spent so much time in candle-lit churches, I feel a strong connection to the poetry of Catholic mystics St. Teresa de Avila and St. John of the Cross.

But a long time ago I became disenchanted with what I perceived as the dogma and rigidity of Catholicism. And I have some wounds related to my upbringing that keep me from embracing this faith. I also disagree with some of the basic church policies about women’s reproductive health and the ordination of women.

Today, my spiritual life centers around mindfulness meditation, long walks in nature, and cultivating peace and love in the world. But my hope is that by walking 15- to 20-miles a day, from cathedral to cathedral, I will reclaim my childhood religion in my own way, on my own terms. No man-made set of rules can or should prevent me from experiencing the divine as I walk across Spain or as I hike up Kennesaw Mountain, the place where my pilgrimage has started.

Hike: A Noiseless Patient Spider With Turkey Buzzards

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Today’s hike was Pigeon Hill trail in Kennesaw. I only did half the hike today because I got a late start. To the visitor’s center from Burnt Hickory Road is 2.5 miles (five miles there and back), but I stopped at Little Kennesaw and turned around so that I would have time to meet my friends for a poetry reading.

Today is Walt Whitman’s 195th birthday, and to honor his poetry some Poetry Atlanta folks have organized a non-stop reading of all 52 songs from Song of Myself.

I was thinking of Whitman as I picked my way across boulders and rocks toward the summit. When I sat on a lichen-covered ledge to take a rest in the shade, a tiny red spider floated in the air next to me, spinning an invisible thread that helped it move up and down, and I remembered Whitman’s poem, “A Noiseless Patient Spider.”
A NOISELESS, patient spider,
I mark’d, where, on a little promontory, it stood, isolated;
Mark’d how, to explore the vacant, vast surrounding,
It launch’d forth filament, filament, filament, out of itself;
Ever unreeling them—ever tirelessly speeding them.

And you, O my Soul, where you stand,
Surrounded, surrounded, in measureless oceans of space,
Ceaselessly musing, venturing, throwing,—seeking the spheres, to connect them;
Till the bridge you will need, be form’d—till the ductile anchor hold;
Till the gossamer thread you fling, catch somewhere, O my Soul.

***

I wish I could experience the same confidence Whitman exudes in the capability of his soul. That’s why I go hiking and meditate, swim in open bodies of water, practice yoga. It’s a path outward that circles inward. Today I felt like most at peace watching the turkey buzzards circling the tree tops, until one swooped close, it’s red face angled toward some dead creature.

 

Gentle Hike to Cascade Falls

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Over Memorial Day weekend I went on a four mile hike on the Pine Mountain trail at Roosevelt State Park, land that is connected to F.D.R.’s Little White House.

F.D.R. chose Warm Springs, GA as a getaway from Washington and the world stage because of the curative properties of thermal springs there. Polio had rendered him paralyzed from the waist down at the age of 39, and bathing in the springs helped him regain some of his strength.

He bought the land surrounding the springs in 1927 and converted the area into a rehabilitation center that is still thriving today. The waters are not available to the general public, but people in need still receive the benefits of the warm springs.

The Pine Mountain trail covers twenty-three miles of easy to moderate hiking through a gentle mountain range, hills mostly, south of Atlanta. The four miles we hiked took us from a radio tower and picnic area off a two-lane highway to a meandering creek-side path under the cover of oaks, pines, and rhododendron. Tiny waterfalls spilled over brown and gold rocks along the way.

We crossed the creek several times until we reached our destination, Cascade Falls. We took our boots off, waded into the cool water, and later watched a millipede crawl across the sand while we dried our feet in a patch of sunlight.

I scrambled up a twenty-five- or thirty-foot overhang just because it was there. I started climbing what seemed like a stone stairway, but about halfway up I realized I would have to pull myself up part of the way, which was a little scary. I should have taken the trail to the top. But I made it, and was relieved once I flopped myself over the ledge.