Say What?

So, Alex and I spent a lovely day in the mountains on Saturday, hiking trails that I used to mountain bike quite often. The scenery was stunning, temperature ideal, conversation never tired and I was reminded, once again, that his father, step-mother and I have succeeded in raising an amazing young man.

During the descent, he pulled out his phone, clipped it to his shirt and pushed play... "I was a male stripper in a go-go bar, I was a male stripper in a go-go bar..." That's my boy!

Right-on!

So, I dislike being wrong. Suppose most people are with me in this. Just when I think I can't... I can- wrong again. Sigh.

At Least This is Certain

A line from Poe's The Raven came to mind as I was driving today;

" and the silken sad uncertain rustling of each purple curtain..."

Dad would recite this to me when I was little, nothing like a peaceful, cheerful story before drifting off to sleep! My favorite line followed...

"Thrilled me - filled me with fantastic terrors never felt before".

Of course, dad delivered this with such a fierce tremor in his voice and rising volume from beginning to end, that it succeeded in doing to me just what it did to the poor man who was mourning his lost Lenore! But it's the word "uncertain"that brought this memory back to me today.

I'm reminded how "uncertain" life really is. How through hopes, dreams, prayers and faith... it is all still, in the end, largely uncertain. Health can deteriorate in an instant, relationships can either blossom or fade just as fast, a child clings to a mother one day, then pushes away in their own necessary development the next. What is one to do with this amount of uncertainty? Accept it? Prepare for it? Deny it? Embrace it? Fear it?

Maybe it's my fledgling attempts at understanding the concept of faith and how it's related to the concept of hope, that makes me question and wonder and even fear uncertainty a little. Perhaps if I understood faith the way others seem to, life would appear and possibly be more "certain".

There is some certainty, of course. My hopes are certain. I hope for health, a loving, lasting and understanding relationship, happiness for my son and family, etc.

Maybe that's where I over think it all. Of course the end result will be uncertain. Life throws too much at each of us to be able to accurately predict much of anything. What we hope for is certain but the result is not. Is it faith that gives us certainty that a result will be good or at the very least brings us peace knowing that a result can be dealt with and accepted?

Ah, maybe I'm just making it all more difficult than it needs to be... that's what happens when you naturally find peace with absolutes. Looks like I need to read a book... or two.

The Mountains are my Field

"Out beyond ideas of wrongdoing and rightdoing, there is a field. I'll meet you there." Rumi, thirteenth-century Sufi poet

For all of my life there has been peace for me in the mountains. I'd like to think I'll live in them someday. While hunting arrowheads with siblings and parents when young, I imagined how the Indians lived. In the mind of a young girl, it seemed they had calm, simple, and beautiful lives. How fun it would be to have my own horse, braid my hair, fling open the flap on my tepee and head out to the wilderness for the day.

Now, and for the past 12 years or so, I find myself returning to the mountains for that dose of something special... a kind of reconnection to nature that I find most powerful. From summits of peaks in the Tetons, to hiking and boarding in the Jackson Pass area, to mountain biking, trail running and hikes in the rain with Alex, there is a spirit that is there even when surrounded by friends and conversation... but it is especially felt when alone. I intend to return more and more.