I am so excited and content and happy. I am a time in my life that I’m making lifelong friends, a process I hope never stops, but I feel it especially now, the possibilities and the crazy reality that is now and forever. I am me. I have potential. I am unique. I am special. I am free.
Coming into the park, my expectations for myself and my experience were higher than El Cap, and I took it upon myself not to disappoint. Where I’ve ended up is confused, tired, unmotivated to climb. I haven’t been since I got here.
It embarrasses me. I live in Yosemite, the climbing Mecca of the world, I celebrity watch daylong at my job, I live beneath the face of Tissiac, I contemplate North Dome and try to find Serenity beneath the Royal Arches, fresh rockfall produces new boulder problems and yet I don’t climb. I don’t want to. I am not compelled to.
It kills me to write this. This is the reason I’ve been silent via internet, why my blogs are stilted. I am embarrassed. My expectations were higher than El Cap, I had so many.
Now, I wait. I wait for the inspiration, and until then, I do other things. I work at the Yosemite Lodge Cone Shack by the pool, helping
I’m thinking of saying goodbye to the lot of them. Of giving my two weeks and shoving off from dishing brandless ice cream. Of saving myself from tendonitis in my scooping arm (ambidextrous practice isn’t enough), from the temptation of gooey sweetness every single day, saving myself from the soul-sucking existence that is being a cashier at the Yosemite Lodge. Save myself to become myself.
This morning in my journal I wrote to myself to become who I am.
Here, I’ll write it for you. Become Who You Are.
I’ve never written truer words.
I must be developing as a writer.
That was a joke. True, but still a joke.
I’ve come to terms with a lot of things lately. I’m happy to be me. I’m comfortable with my body, even if I don’t like how it looks just now. I’m developing my honesty into a habit, my openness into more than just a show and tell. I make being healthy a life routine, build it into my existence.
I decided to stay here through the fall until December. I decided to gain the certifications to be a guide – WFR and maybe
I can do better.
I’m reading On the Road, by Jack Kerouac. His character Sal Paradise (who’s really Jack anyway) said, “…life is holy and every moment is precious.”
I wholeheartedly agree. In a way, a lot of what I’m reading relates to what I’m living. The Beat generation was revolutionary for their time. I feel like I’m living a revolution right now, the green revolution, the health revolution, living the mind-body connection in a way most of fat
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I have met my other half, in the form of two people. I’ve never been great at making friends, and meeting people I connect with is as rare as leap years. Meeting two, that’s providence. Marina and John, people I’m unable to describe but whom I feel fully.
New phase of exploration: Go. Start out now, opening avenues to the world, stay open and alert and happy and go forward, seeking, feeling, being. Forget the unneccessaries. Forget the ridiculous. Forget society. Focus on what’s important. Focus on what’s essential to happiness. Love and friendship.
In On the Road, DeanMoriarty and Carlo Marx decide to share absolutely everything on their minds. The sit across from each other and discuss everything, letting it flow out, being precise about meanings, voice inflections, innuendos, references of the past day. It sounded horribly boring, tedious yet liberating, this honesty that in modern times we don’t have time for.
Absolute honesty. Communication. Trust. Understanding. The foundation to a good relationship is in these words.
4 comments:
Glad to have you writing again :)
Glad to hear from you again. I went to your old stomping ground last weekend. It was busy but surprisingly un-crowded, or maybe that's because I like the shade of the kiddie North Point.
ok so i wrote to you twice already and it was deleted both times so i dig your blug and ill tell you what i think later love you lady
“Through my writing is how I want to affect people. I want to change the world. I want to change the world. I want to change my little piece of the world. I want to help people.”
^^^
"How can I help?" is a meaningful question to many people. But perhaps there is a deeper question we might consider. Perhaps the real question is not how can I help? but how can I serve?
Serving is different from helping. Helping is based on inequality; it is not a relationship between equals. When you help you use your own strength to help those of lesser strength. If I'm attentive to what's going on inside of me when I'm helping, I find that I'm always helping someone who's not as strong as I am, who is needier than I am. People feel this inequality. When we help we may inadvertently take away from people more than we could ever give them; we may diminish their self-esteem, their sense of worth, integrity and wholeness. When I help I am very aware of my own strength. But we don't serve with our strength, we serve with ourselves. We draw from all of our experiences. Our limitations serve, our wounds serve, even our darkness can serve. The wholeness in us serves the wholeness in others and the wholeness in life. The wholeness in you is the same as the wholeness in me. Service is a relationship between equals.
Helping incurs debt. When you help someone they owe you one. But serving, like healing, is mutual. There is no debt. I am as served as the person I am serving. When I help I have a feeling of satisfaction. When I serve I have a feeling of gratitude. These are very different things.
Serving is also different from fixing. When I fix a person I perceive them as broken, and their brokenness requires me to act. When I fix I do not see the wholeness in the other person or trust the integrity of the life in them. When I serve I see and trust that wholeness. It is what I am responding to and collaborating with.
There is distance between ourselves and whatever or whomever we are fixing. Fixing is a form of judgment. All judgment creates distance, a disconnection, an experience of difference. In fixing there is an inequality of expertise that can easily become a moral distance. We cannot serve at a distance. We can only serve that to which we are profoundly connected, that which we are willing to touch. This is Mother Teresa's basic message. We serve life not because it is broken but because it is holy.
If helping is an experience of strength, fixing is an experience of mastery and expertise. Service, on the other hand, is an experience of mystery, surrender and awe. A fixer has the illusion of being causal. A server knows that he or she is being used and has a willingness to be used in the service of something greater, something essentially unknown. Fixing and helping are very personal; they are very particular, concrete and specific. We fix and help many different things in our lifetimes, but when we serve we are always serving the same thing. Everyone who has ever served through the history of time serves the same thing. We are servers of the wholeness and mystery in life.
The bottom line, of course, is that we can fix without serving. And we can help without serving. And we can serve without fixing or helping. I think I would go so far as to say that fixing and helping may often be the work of the ego, and service the work of the spirit. They may look similar if you're watching from the outside, but the inner experience is different. The outcome is often different, too.
Our service serves us as well as others. That which uses us strengthens us. Over time, fixing and helping are draining, depleting. Over time we burn out. Service is renewing. When we serve, our work itself will sustain us.
Service rests on the basic premise that the nature of life is sacred, that life is a joyous mystery which has an unknown purpose. When we serve, we know that we belong to life and to that purpose. Fundamentally, helping, fixing and service are ways of seeing life. When you help you see life as weak, when you fix, you see life as broken. When you serve, you see life as whole. From the perspective of service, we are all connected: All suffering is like my suffering and all joy is like my joy. The impulse to serve emerges naturally and inevitably from this way of seeing.
Lastly, fixing and helping are the basis of curing, but not of healing. In years of chronic illness I have been helped by many people and fixed by a great many others who did not recognize my wholeness. All that fixing and helping left me wounded in some important and fundamental ways. Only service heals.
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