Intersecting circles

At the end of her book, Encounters with the Invisible, Dorothy Wall writes about planning a trip to the mountains, the first in ten years after she collapsed with Chronic Fatigue Syndrome. She and her husband spread maps of the Sierras on the bed, planning their route. I finish reading this book after returning from my trip to the mountains, and think about illness as an internal journey, one that is unplanned and unmapped, into uncharted territory, without even giving one's consent to go along for the ride.

Just last night, I was saying to my friend how healing it was to go out to the mountains, healing for the spirit to experience all the varied scenery, the change in air, and the sense of aloneness while at the same time being in the company of others. As we were walking, I thought about the people who had laid the trail, carving stairs in the rock, the people who must come out every spring to mark the trail with rows or piles of rocks on the white granite shelf, and all the footprints from this summer's hikers that must wash away if not with the first rain and snow then with the meltwater. My friend said that in the past, before cars, most people never traveled more than 30 miles from their birthplace. I don't know if that was ever true. But I do think that places used to be more varied than they are now. Even in my own childhood, in the 70's and 80's in Britain and Israel, I remember each town having a different local character whereas now they are populated by the same chain stores, the same shopping malls and people. The villages in the mountains here in California retain their own character, for better or worse. We were lucky to find someone awake at midnight to give us a room to stay!

When I got back to the office today, somebody asked if I had makeup on, she thought I looked nice. I explained it was just being outdoors all weekend that put some color in my cheeks.

Dorothy Wall talks about a picture taken before her illness that she used to look to for reassurance of who she was. Then, in a later chapter, she realizes how one can never return. I think this is best captured in TS Eliot's Four Quartets: "Fare forward travellers! Not escaping from the past/Into different lives, or into any future;/You are not the same people who left the station..." We assume a continuity of self which is shattered by an illness that flies in the face of our ordinary can do mentality. Wall remembers her grandmother and her father reading to her from The Little Engine that Could the lines "I think I can, I think I can... I thought I could, I thought I could." Interestingly, the author of the eponymous engine was a house pseudonym of the publishing company, and the story one that had been retold many times. My grandmother used to read me that story, as I was reminded when I heard my mother reading it to my children. I believe that in life we are to some degree following tracks, but our engines are generally facing backwards and we spend most of our lives running away, even if we think we have eyes in the backs of our heads to see the next mountain and chug up it. My mother used to believe in geographical solutions to her problems, generally problems of the body that she attributed to the physical environment, both internal and external. She never realized that they were her fellow travelers and simply changed.

We generally choose the path of our physical bodies through space, and this helps us feel alive, like the Little Engine. We can spread out maps and navigate through the world. The effects this will have on our inner experience are less predictable. I think of all the times I might have bumped into Dorothy Wall in the streets of Berkeley, like leaves floating on a stream bumping into each other, maybe never to meet again, maybe to cross further downstream.

I think of my relationship with my friend, who thinks too much. Now he's got me thinking as well! As we walked through the burnt forest at the end of our hike, I was thinking for some reason that I would give him a facing edition of Dante's Divine Comedy for his next birthday, when he turns 35. Apparently, that was Dante's age when he wrote that or started writing it, contrary to the common myth that people in those days only lived to 30. "Nel mezzo del camin di nostra vita..." I wonder if there is a particular circle of hell for overthinking, where all the Little Engines that Could chug up and down a mountain, never realizing that they are traveling backwards and going round and round in circles, never noticing that it's always the same mountain, and that they are not all alone in the woods.