Broken record: I ache today.
But it's not because we went far; only about 9 miles. I think, instead, it was the rocky bits pushing through my trail shoes.
The rocky bits. How I’ve wanted to avoid them. Go around them. Sail over them. Swim under them. When I can’t do any of these, I try a different approach — I try to rush them, like a quarterback. How quickly my focus changes from being present to getting beyond these bits.
This is a lifelong habit.
Today’s steep incline was filled with sharp and pointy shale. I spent the first part of it whining under my breath, then justifying my whining. I’ve had knee surgeries, after all. As if this were unique to someone over 50.
Thankfully I got tired of listening to myself whine fairly quickly and I moved on to examining the path, to zeroing in on it with my full focus. What beautiful patterns and striations in the stones. I let my mind wander into the power of pushing up through the earth — the solidness it takes to stand and be seen (and felt through a shoe).
I am carrying several rocks in my pocket. Some represent old wounds and I plan to leave them on this path. Others I find too pretty to pass by — I collect them to bring back to my family. My pockets are stuffed with weighty regrets and loves. Despite this, despite my aches and whines, I feel lighter with each step. I feel buoyant once I get my whining out.
As you've read many times on this blog, I know Joe is carrying rocks too. There have been days when radiant, happy Joe reappears to walk beside me. On these days I feel hopeful he has passed through whatever darkness he’s been lost in. But they are few and far between, these days. More, as we move nearer to the end, to Santiago, what I feel is a heaviness growing in his center, taking root. A rock pushing up through his heart, demanding to stand and be seen.
My Al-anon sponsor warns me again and again I must not try to fix Joe; that he has his own map to navigate. He urges me to listen to the higher voice I hear in the rocks, and feel in their sharpness under my feet. He tells me heed the drive I sometimes feel to walk quickly away from Joe’s constant references to his brokenness and what feels to me like self-imprisonment and loathing.
I trust my sponsor. But even though I have followed this advice and even written about how it's helped me detach with love, I am human. I feel confusion. It is so so hard to walk forward alone knowing that bruises are forming on my beloved’s heart two miles or two days behind me. Deep hematomas.
I look down at the rocky path and I see the faults in the stone. I see them so clearly, the fissures. When they become deep enough one rock will break into two, like cells dividing.
I see myself in this process, with all those I love, especially my children and especially Joe. I am breaking off, not away. Shifting slightly in the dirt. Finding myself beside — rather than bound to — these ones I love. In this process of natural splitting we each move a little distance down the path to press into the foot of another pilgrim who will walk here one, two maybe 2,000 years from now.
We are all rocks — strong, hard, ever-present, sustaining, holding up, the glue of the earth.
And, we are all pilgrims walking across the knife-edged stones of ourselves and each other feeling the need to "get it over with." Pain. Get it over with.
What I hear from that inner voice is: Don’t sail over, go around, swim under. Don’t rush. There is no getting over. There is no path without rock. And, anyway, pain doesn’t come from the rock. It comes from the mountain climbs to avoid it.
On the contrary. All the beauty of being here, our all and only purpose, is found in the stiff rocky ascending and unbalanced descending.
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