I’m heading up Mt. Rubidoux in the heat of the early evening. It’s one of the few places I feel safe to be out and about and alone, with only myself for company and only myself for protection. In these evenings, I’m a driving companion for our newly licensed driver. Neither of us are quite ready to give up these half hours together as she drives herself to and from school, no matter what the state of California says. During morning classes, I drive into the adjacent neighborhood and find a tree willing to shelter me as I sit in my car and work. But in the evening, I lift my eyes to the hills, and just a stone’s throw from the school is Rubidoux, and she’s calling me.
I lock my car and head towards the entrance to the mountain, watching people on the last steps of the journey I still have ahead.
The young woman who went up the mountain in a wheelchair is coming down the home stretch on piggy back.
I pass one, two, three, four people zipped up into plastic jackets, faces streaming.
"It's good to be hydrated,” enthuses a little girl in purple and pink, with her hair in a bun.
The man on his electric skateboard is sailing upwards with a smooth undulation of hips to the one-two-three of his mariachi.
We’re all Elle Woods today. “Exercise gives you endorphins. Endorphins make you happy. Happy people just don’t shoot their husbands,"
Each person has a distinctive walk, so I walk in their shoes for a few yards, feel it out in my own body. One swings his legs from the bottoms of his feet. For another one, it’s the uplift of the toes that drive the stride.
A steep turn into the entrance to the mountain. My legs are heavy and it doesn’t feel easy. I think about turning back.
My eyes stay on the path. There are wet patches of spit everywhere. Why do men spit? I ponder awhile. Maybe its because men are not accustomed to swallowing down the things that bother them.
I’m fascinated by the different bodies that go up and down this mountain. The un-ageable men and women who don't look like strong bodies but can jog steadily up the mountain with their love handles and apple tummies. A gym bro satisfied with the way his shirt displays his muscles and a moment later, a woman in a mint green work dress, pencil skirt, and cream colored flats with a bow. The toddler in her stroller, pushing ahead of her a baby doll in her stroller. The quadriplegic using her mouth to drive herself up the mountain.
I'm still the slowest. People pass me literally right and left. But every time it's a little easier to lift my heavy legs through each step.
For some reason, this is the hardest stretch for me—the part where I’ve had a taste of what’s to come and there’s still the possibility of turning back. I tune that voice out and tune in to the blue-green constellations of the prickly pear families.
I think of the people who live out their lives inside of walls, their bodies unable to come out into the sunshine, to lift one foot and then the next without measure. When I was in bed with Long Covid for those nine months, I thought of the life buzzing on this hill, without me. It was wholly inaccessible, a painful dream arising out of an absence of hope.
I crunch a seed pit under foot, playing my part in the effort of new life. My unresponsive muscles need some reminders: Heel toe, heel toe. My grandma's walking mantra has become my own.
I come to a fork in the path. I choose the steep side.
I'm teaching my brain that it's safe to be strong. That strength and joy are not beacons flashing, alerting a vengeful Taker. I lived under that regime for so long, trying to make myself small enough or good enough to slip past its notice.
Shall I swing my arms and legs higher? After all the months where my only choice for my body was in how I responded to forces beyond my will, what does it mean to choose to push my physical limits? I can only unravel fear as its edges are exposed.
Spanglish is the language of the trail and I shamelessly eavesdrop on the bits I can pick out: dinner plans and school troubles.
A little voice as I go by. Estoy muy cansado. A second later, a wail.
It’s been one year since I started getting better. I’ve faithfully met every stage of trauma processing and recovery this year, but I’ve really been looking forward to getting to the end of the “one year since…” events. It’s getting old. This one year mark feels like a passage into something new, but the old isn’t going to go without a fight. The spasm of extinction.
Resolution emerges. I not going to live with this constant negotiation with the past anymore. I’m cutting ties.
I come around a curve and the city stretches out before me. I shift the focus of my eyes so I cease to see the asphalt and the buildings.
I am interested in that which is invisible, the unseen things that are in plain sight.
The neighborhood of living things comes into focus. I see a vibrant web of beings—their life pulsating, humming, moving. A reality that is overlaying and undergirding what we perceive.
We’re steeped from birth in stories of a dying planet, dying animals, dying plants. Extinction. Catastrophe.
I’m coming awake to how alive everything is. I have a deep faith in the aliveness of the earth and in her durability.
The definition of the earth is more than her trauma.
Around the corner and the first real breeze, unfettered.
I am all things in one moment, and just this the next.
Now that I’m strong enough to go a little faster, I have to remind myself to slow down to a speed where I can hear the mountain through the noise of my effort. Where exertion does not crowd out receptiveness.
The mountain has taken her time bringing me into her trust. She doesn’t wear her heart on her sleeve. Some non-human beings are available as soon as I open myself to them. Others prefer to hold their secrets longer. I could be patient for the mountain.
I’m climbing in earnest now. Today I notice a change. The beat of my heart is moving from almost two years of the weak flutter so reminiscent of POTS and atrophy, towards a thud that has a little bit of heft to it.
It's okay to live. To do things that take strength and build strength.
Three young men are talking about a "spiritual high". I have to wonder—earnest Christians or mushrooms?
I watch the bodies go by. There are bodies put on display, and bodies hidden from sight. A paradox—the more you try to hide your body, the more noticeable it becomes.
The rocks are absorbing the sun and ringing with heat. Silent witnesses to the conversation and drama of the lives that come and go. Niches providing places for the tenacious to hold on to.
I feel a deep frustration with a theology of exceptionalism that separates us from the wholeness and oneness with the earth from whence we came. A theology of endings based on a life fraught with choices and destinations. What are you going to do with your one precious life? A myopic misdirection that blocks from view the whole of things, our belonging in the waves of long time. Life not so dire after all. We will return, time after time.
I cross the bridge when I come to it.
I see my new knowings reflected everywhere. In the grasses dried out at the peak of their lives. The stems reaching up up up with the gift of a blossom holding seeds outstretched. Frozen, dried in its prime. Vesuvius in miniature. Like me, lying in bed, with all I have to offer the world trapped within me. Believing in things unseen. The interminable nothingness, the trial by heat and storm.
How could I have ever believed that my effort owes me results.
Manifestation is a cruel hoax. Control, a delusion. You have no power to make things happen. What comes, comes.
The dried grasses and bushes wait. If they don't make it through the season, that's okay. They'll just become part of life again in another way.
I've spent years blocking out the brownness of the hills here in Riverside. But I have a new affinity for the land with which I live that does not hold on to green. To join with those around me who, for all intents and purposes, spend most of the year dead.
How could I have been lulled into the myth of the evergreen?
Today I make it to the top.
Some love to feel the sun on their face, but my true love is the breeze. It comes to me like a friend. Sudden gusts, sudden gifts. A full sensory experience, here then gone.
I close my eyes and focus in on the beat of my heart. No more shying away from what scares me. Can I drop all the stories connected to this sensation?
It beats stronger, slower, a rhythm that does not take me back. A little pain in my chest, vestigial— is the ache a reminder of the past or a response to the immensity of the present?
Oh my heart.
I have walked this mountain with joy in my heart and my flock of babies around me. I have gritted my teeth as my hands were rubbed raw from the acidic grip of child misery. I have walked up this mountain chanting "I have control over my own life, I have control over my own life," while feeling absolutely powerless.
I practice long sight, my eyes adjusting to accommodate other mountains. Far seeing.
There's a big cross here at the top. I don't care for it. So ostentatious. Stolid, solid as though suffering and victory are permanent. I prefer the dry grasses with the ever-open posture of those who have released their seeds to the winds.
Beyoncé takes me down the hill.
My weight shifts out of my throat and into my hips.
The breeze holding me on one side, the rocks holding me with their arms of heat on the other.
I get more smiles on the way down. But I give more too.
At the entrance to a mountain, there was a man drowning out everything with music blaring. I have cultivated a benevolent tolerance for the people who play their music from their mini-speakers as they climb, but this was excessive. I see that man coming around the corner, he’s on his way up now, pulling his double speakers behind him in a wagon, smiling at everyone. He meets my eye straight on and suddenly I realize that he believes the music can transfer his joy to us, if only he can play it loud enough. I realize that he might be right.
I find the last vestiges of tension hiding in the abdominal viscera that holds my insides in and the outside out. It’s safe to let go. It’s safe to welcome whatever comes and release whatever goes.
I search for the joy in my body and find it ringing around me like an aura. I, too, am a ringing stone. I search harder and find that joy lives on the skin of the back of my arm. The top of my head feels light.
The earth, she can hold us. Everything we've got. Her capacity is endless.
Small children in strollers make eye contact, eyes taking me in. One of us smiles first, the other mirrors it back, co-conspirators.
The girls I’m following are talking about their skin care routines. The girl in front of me sneezes. God bless you, says her friend but then is immediately apologetic about her automatic response. She didn’t mean to offend someone of a different faith. What? says the first girl. You don’t want your god to bless me?
I’m anonymous enough and invisible enough to exercise my atrophied social skills. I’m not used to maintaining a boundary layer and the sense of being exposed makes my face twitch. I pull the anonymity tighter around me. Can I disconnect my affect from its usefulness as a responsive mechanism and allow it to be?
Mom, dad, abuela and abuelo are resting against a large rock, bathing in the warm orange of the sunset. Kids are scrambling on rocks. There’s a plastic grocery bag with food and I imagine it’s real food from a real home.
I pass person after person pointing their phones at the sunset, smiles on every face. There’s none of the disconnect cynics deplore, only the joy of stopping to look and the pleasure of sharing.
A father leans into the incline as he pulls two little boys behind him in a wagon. The baby dangling almost parallel to the ground in his sling is smiling (life's a lark!).
A lanky boy in a black hoodie lopes past me and then jumps up, clicks his heels.
Enterprising entrepreneurs are appearing. Aguas frescas and frutas, and this is new, a young woman with a cooler full of ice cold water bottles parked on the side of the path near the end--or the beginning--of the walk. Another young woman is selling plastic tubes full of something fruity and frozen. I don't know what it is! I've never seen it before!
I’m on the sidewalk lined with cars now. Tonight there’s a food truck with sandwiches and bags full of orange Mexican wheels.
Cars are pulling in, a new wave of people each with their own pilgrimage ahead. A man drives by in his white undershirt, enjoying the evening with his windows rolled down. Low-rider energy in a red Prius.
The breeze is more tame down here. My cheeks are radiating. The friendliness of the evening carries me to my car.
I'm in the world, and of it.
I really appreciate all that you share here. Especially your courage and putting such a vulnerable part of your heart on the page. Interesting how you are such a positive and thoughtful observer. Not a speck of judgment. Maybe a gift of being on the other side? I admire you.
What a delight to find your words in my inbox. This was absolutely beautiful, each person their own moment in your ensemble cast. Two things: I read the sentence about men being unaccustomed to swallowing things with my 8th grade brain and laughed so hard AND I read the “spasm of extinction” as “spasm of exorcism” and I suppose, both could be true. Perhaps just a leftover fluke of working in a church, but I noticed on my second read that I had made that mistake and chuckled at the truth of them both. May your old stories be gone and may your strength fill their place, surrounded all by joy. You are such a gift to all of us who get to journey with your words. ❤️