Winifred's notes: I forgot where I saw this beautiful article a while ago, I am posting it here to share it with all of you.
When her attempts to heal a broken heart with drugs, booze, and sex failed, one woman embarked on a solitary journey that saved her life. - By Cheryl Strayed
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The cure was being alone, speaking to no one, and thinking only of walking, eating, and where she would stop to rest.)
One summer I decided to become incredible. Acutally, it was deep in a Minnesota winter when I decided to do this, but it would be in the summer time that I would execute this task, this transformation, this sprint out of the mire my life had become. I was 26 and heartbroken. Over the sudden death of my young mother and over the subsequent death of my young marriage and over the way I had allowed my life to tumble painfully over both of these things over and over again. My sorrows joined hands and multiplied with each passing month. They made everything good seem far away and long ago and unrelated to me. To temper my grief I had been saying yes to everything: to meaningless sex, to too much wine, to the meth or coke or
ecstasy that was periodically passed my way by coworkers at the restaurant where I was waiting tables.
I want to write, "And then one day ... " as if my decision to become incredible was a sudden dawning, a bolt of lightning, a spark that caught fire, but this would not be true. What's true is this: There was one day when I read a poem by Rilke and another day one by Adrienne Rich and another day the fable about the phoenix that rises from the ashes. There was one day
I sat in a café and wrote in my journal nonstop for three hours and another day that I sat doing nothing on a cold bench in a frozen park and another day that I cried on the bus because I witnessed something small and plain and beautiful. There was one day I thought about how lucky I was, despite my losses, and another day I remembered the things I used to promise my mother I'd grow up and become, and another day when I remembered what I'd silently promised myself. And then there were days in between when I drank too much wine or had sex with the wrong person or snorted something that kept me up, miserably, for three days. But there came a day, after a long accumulation of all these days, when I knew I needed to change my life, that if I didn't I might as well be dead.
And then I thought about whether I wanted to be dead. Dead is where my beloved mother was. Dead is where I might be joined with her again -- though I wasn't even 50 percent sure I believed in such things. But dead was dead and alive was aliave, and I realized that I wanted very much to be alive, and if I was going to be alive, well, then I might as well be incredible. The thought was clear as rain on a tin roof, palpable as an apple in the palm of your hand. It was there for my taking: my future life. Incredible.
Not strictly, literally incredible, as the first entry of most dictionaries defines it (too extraordinary and improbable to be believed), but the way most of the second entries put it (to exist on a very high level). My version of incredible was more humble. I didn't care about being rich or
famous. I needed to be happy in love, invigorated by my work, and engaged with my life, to feel that I was a part of the world that contained light as well as dark, to feel that I was part of the world at all. So I decided I would become incredible in the most ordinary way. I would stop all the nonsense, all the saying yes to the wrong things and no to the right ones. But first I needed to do something dramatic to help me get from here to there, from my old life to my new one, something that actually was incredible -- which is how I came to spend four months hiking almost 2,000 miles by myself in the wilderness through California and Oregon on the Pacific Crest Trail.
It was harder than I thought it would be, physically. I'd grown up in the country, camped on weekends, walked a fair amount. For some reason I believed these things would prepare me for days and weeks and months of toiling with a 50-pound backpack over mountains and hills, across desserts, icy rivers, and trails strewn with brush and fallen trees. They did not. Nothing prepared me for what would come each day but the day before.
And this is how I lived that summer of becoming incredible. Day by day.
Each day I woke just before dawn and walked as far as I could before dusk. In the first weeks of my journey, ten miles a day almost killed me; in the final months I usually went 20. My life consisted of little more than walking, eating, sleeping, and performing the tasks required to live -- pumping water from streams and lakes, setting up and breaking down my tent, cooking meals on my tiny backpacker's stove. As I walked, I thought about everything I could think of to think about: politics, the lyrics of songs I never understood, whether there was a God or not, and why, even after all those miles of hiking, blisters still formed on my feet from time to time. I thought about every relationship in my life, those large and small, fleeting and lifelong, and about nothing at all, or about the most practical matters: the next meal I would eat, where I would make camp that evening. Each night I read from a book and then the next morning I would brun the pages I'd read -- less weight in my pack. Only rarely did I cross paths with another person. I went one stretch without seeing anyone for 13 days, though usually
I'd meet someone every three or four. I was alone, but not lonely, with myself in a way I had never been before, in a way most never are, and my solitude, instead of leaving me sad and threadbare, filled me up like a warm soup.
I was, in short, becoming my version of incredible, which, as it turned out, amounted to the simple act of getting quiet enough, alone enough, humble enough to see myself, my whole real, self.
Yet, in those months, I seldom literally saw myself at all, or at least not in the way I'd been used to seeing myself, reflected in the glass panes of mirrors and windows. Like most girls and women, I'd looked at reflections of myself at least a dozen times a day without even thinking about it, searching to see what others saw, examining my surface, rather than my
depths. My body was a palette I scrutinized rather than a place I inhabited. Usually what I saw was less than what I'd hoped to see. I was too fat or pale, my nose was too big, or my arms too dotted with freckles.
For those four months I was hiking I was forced to see myself in an entirely new way: not in reflection, but in action. It wasn't the flat surface of a mirror that told me what I looked like; it was my own eyes. I saw my grubby hands as they worked the water filter, my legs as they bent to hoist my pack, my toes as four of my toenails fell off, one by one. I saw the bruises
and scrapes I'd acquired, the deep tan, how the new muscles of my calves rippled beneath my skin.
When I did see reflections of myself -- in the occasional glimmer on the surface of a lake -- I wasn't looking to discern whether I was ugly or beautiful, but to see what had become of me, how like a wild animal I looked how new and strange. Before I began my trip I'd planned to photograph this transformation. I'd intended to use the timer on my camera to take a self-portrait each day as a way to document my journey, but I didn't follow through. Of my 120-some days on the trail, I snapped four, maybe give photos of myself. Once I couldn't see myself anymore, I didn't need to. I knew. In my journey into myself, my outer self mattered less and less.
Years have passed since that journey, and I'd like to say that when I look at myself in the mirror now I am free of vanity and judgment, full of wonder and wisdom, but this would be a lie. I still scrutinize and study and often grumble over the self I see reflected in the mirror. But I also see my other self, the wild animal self who hiked 2,000 miles alone carrying a 50-pound
pack. That's the self I pay attention to, the one who, in the course of those miles, came to see how much else there is to see. How one must rise from the sorrow, no matter what. How walking in the woods for a long time will make you rise. No matter that your mom is dead or your husband is no longer your husband or you wasted two years drinking coffee and wine with your journal in your hands, staring out of café windows.
Oh, and I saw the world, too. That became clearer, more nuanced with the miles. How every tree is distinct, how they accumulate inside of you over the days.
How, when you look hard and long enough, you see the sky isn't just blue anymore. How it can be so many colors at once that you have to think of another word for blue because blue alone won't do.Labels: articles
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