What the Mountain Taught Me

Clouds roll in over the mountains, a view from our window.

After two and a half years of living in the mountains of Southern California, Mike and I made our departure shortly after the New Year.

Our last week before the move was filled with some of the Mountain’s greatest hits - snow storms, power outages, mud slides and major road closures, paired with time spent marveling at how winter manages to hold the extreme of life coming to a halt and life bursting at the seams.

Winter was my favorite season to be there.

A major snow storm sets all the animals scurrying for shelter and for a little while you feel the intensity, and the silence, of life’s retreat. The trees brace for the high winds and casually teach anyone willing to pay attention how capable life is of enduring. After the storm passes, life returns. Go outside before the plows come around and you’ll find the evidence of squirrels, and coyotes, and bears passing through by simply looking at the snow. Go outside once the sun returns and you’ll hear the sound of snow melting so quickly that you might mistake it for a summer storm. Take a moment to tune in and you’ll hear the joy, and the exuberance, of birds finding their songs again.

We didn’t go to the mountains to pay attention but that was the ongoing invitation in our time there. The mountains were a place, and a space, to learn to deeply listen. Our big plans to record an album and get into focused, “productive”, creating were traded for a far less linear agenda. A lot of that came with the territory. Being flexible is less of a preference when you’re simultaneously faced with a flat tire and a 5 day power outage due to an unprecedented blizzard - it’s a necessity. We learned to laugh at how regularly plans fell away for presence. It didn’t necessarily get more comfortable but it did get more familiar. We were given ample opportunities to practice releasing the idea that we can control uncertainty; opportunities to accept (often reluctantly) that more often than not we have no fucking idea. In that gradual surrender we did a lot of listening and meeting ourselves. A lot of excavating wounds. A lot of long talks about what we really want. A lot of dreaming by the fire and by the trees and by the lake. We adopted a husky (named Zella), we got married, and we increasingly found something like clarity.

I had so many moments where I was hit with the realization that the mountain was holding my healing. So many moments where I intimately felt the love and the encouragement of the land beneath and around me. I learned so much and I wrote so much about it. But the thing is - there’s a big difference between finding clarity and practicing clarity - in living from a place of the clarity that you’ve found. This next season of my life is all about the latter. It’s one thing to believe in the idea of “compassionate accountability” and “trusting life beyond scarcity” and it’s a completely different thing to practice those beliefs with actual people. It’s a different thing to practice those beliefs without spiritually bypassing the reality of being hurt, or wronged, or in pain with needs unmet. It’s a different thing to practice those beliefs with good boundaries that simultaneously value community and honor individual sovereignty. It’s a different thing to practice love while submerged in the complexity of life without punishing ourselves for how impossible it is to “get it right”. Living in the mountains was glorious. And it was also really hard and isolating. It’s thrilling to be back in civilization, and it’s also terrifying. Throw all of that in with an ongoing pandemic and it’s honestly more intense than seems reasonable.

Love is so risky - and even with all that I know and believe in, I still feel the weight of that risk every time. I’d still rather not be hurt. I still don’t like tolerating discomfort, or pain, or conflict, or uncertainty. I’m still human and I’ve got years of putting on a tough exterior, to survive a world that doesn’t know what to do with Highly Sensitive people, to unlearn.

To be a human among humans is vulnerable. The world comes up with all sorts of ways to dilute that fact - we’re just one fill in the blank away from overcoming truths that are essential to us. We’re taught to numb and run and pretend. But our ability to feel is what makes us human. To disconnect from that is to disconnect from ourselves. I know all of this! The mountain taught me- and I’m still practicing how to return to it. How to hold the fact that healing isn’t a destination but a practice. How to hold the fact that even healing can be weaponized to make us question our worthiness to be who we are.

The world is all too eager to tell us that we’re wrong or bad or not enough - but if you listen closely; the Earth would beg to differ. If you listen closely our healing, our remembrance, and our return to ourselves is always being held. Even when it feels messy, even when it feels scary, even when it feels unknown and isolating we aren’t alone in our transformations. And no matter the size or scale, no matter how seemingly seen or celebrated; those transformations matter.

The fixation on getting things right, on getting it perfect, on performing our “goodness” only serves to rob us of the ability to grow into a truth that holds it all.

It only distracts us from remembering that it was love all along.