Thoughts on the Bhagavad Gita While Climbing Mount Colden

Last weekend, Tom and I took our first ever 2 day weekend away from our kids. We've gone on overnights before, but two nights away? It seemed impossible. Thanks to our most trusted friends and relations, a dream became a reality.

Where to go? The Adirondacks, of course. What to do? Hike for 9 hours, ascending a +4700 foot peak, naturally. What, do you think we'd just sit on our butts reading old copies of the New Yorker? Well, actually, that's exactly what I wanted to do. But Tom has 46r fever, and I am a loving and supportive spouse, so we got up at 7am, made a quick breakfast, packed a gigantic lunch, filled our water bottles and packs and headed off to the Adirondack Loj.

But before we left Northampton, I dropped off my four-year-old at his pre-school and slipped into Yoga Sanctuary for some pre-vacation vacation. Sara, my teacher, preached on my favorite line of the Bhagavad Gita: Better to do your own dharma poorly than another's brilliantly. It was this line, ironically, that led me to abandon my own yoga teacher training two years ago. I had been thinking that becoming a yoga teacher would somehow mold me into the all-knowing, and incidentally gorgeous, guru/life coach I was to morph into now that my music career was in its sunset years. As we worked on opening our shoulders, I pondered this. Instead of feeling sunsetty, I was feeling pretty excited about my music career these days. Over the years, our mission has always been "write and perform songs that kids will one day sing on the back of the schoolbus at the tops of their lungs." We're actually right on track for that. Sure, we once hoped to be the next Beatles, but that ambition faded early on. Fame at that level makes it very difficult to raise a family, deeply know oneself without too many outside opinions, or have a peaceful dinner at one's favorite restaurant.

On the trail to Mt. Colden, there is a 2.2 mile walk in to Marcy Dam. There is a certain pine forest that we both remember well, somewhere on this walk in, but we are too focused on our feet and miss it. It's weird to be on this trail, a trail I have hiked so many times for so many years. Today there are scores of hikers; in fact, we almost didn't get a parking place when we arrived at 8:30am. The trail is also the one for Mount Marcy, New York's State's highest peak, and on this Saturday of Labor Day weekend, everyone seems bound and determined to bag the biggest peak. As we march along, we pass and are passed by hiker after hiker, some with walking sticks, some with oxygen tanks. "Marcy is a highway," said one of my mountain climbing gurus back in the 90s when I was doing the 46r thing. The implication was, real hikers go for the less flashy peaks. Why focus only on Number One?

Marcy Dam used to be a lake: here's Tom and our dog Cody in 2005:

But Hurricane Irene destroyed the dam, and now it's more like a swamp.(Mt. Colden is in the background).

Tom and I talk about the article in the New York Times by Firmin DeBrabender a few weeks back; in it he write about the myth of individualism, much discussed in this presidential election. I am thinking about the many many reasons that right now I am motivated to climb this peak, why I made the choice to exert myself this way instead of resting. There's no right or wrong; it's just curious. Am I climbing instead of resting because I want to be with Tom? Yes. Am I climbing instead of resting because I am driven? Yes. Not to become a 46r (I became one of those in 1993, in a kind of lemming-esque way; my whole family and group of friends were doing it, so I tagged along). Am I like Hillary, climbing "because it's there"? Definitely. And I like hiking. I love the expanse of time, part of it in silence and part in conversation with the one I love best. It's time with God. My mind needs days like this, where I am so focused on a task that it can't wander too much--especially on the steep or tricky parts. As we ascend through the woods, over rocks and soft pine, I feel myself relax, even as I exert. I feel my legs strengthen, my lungs work. I breathe in the smell of balsam, that seminal scent from my childhood, my own madeleine.

What is my dharma? Is it to make music in exactly the way I always have? Is it to encourage others to see the bonds music forges? Am I supposed to go to Divinity school? If so, why? Do people really have a dharma that is so specific, like "be a doctor" or "be a poet"? What if my dharma is just to be Nerissa?

My mission today was to be as present as I could be; to witness the journey, appreciate the birches (which have a relatively short life-span, Tom tells me, and they are my favorites.) I make a point of looking up every few minutes so that I don't get caught in my thoughts. Still, I get pretty caught up in my thoughts.

We come to many false peaks and one stinky stagnant lake (Lake Arnold). We run into a couple of young friendly Cornell students who are happy to just recline at this lake. "Don't you want to get to the top?" I say, bewildered. "We're thinking about it," they say.

At the summit, we sit and gaze at Algonquin and Iroguois, my favorite peaks. Then we pick up our lunches and move to the other side to stare at Marcy and her neighbors. A couple of very professional looking hikers come up behind us. "Is that Redfield over there?" I ask them, pointing.

"Yup, I'll give you that," says the man.

"And is that Grey?" I continue, pointing to a peak in the foreground.

"Sure is, at least I think it is," he says. I continue asking this stranger who surely must know. Then his wife says, "Congratulate him! He is a 46r today!" So we do; and then I realize that he has no better sense of which peaks are which than I do. I wish my dad were with us.

On the way down, my legs are like spaghetti. We pass the Cornell kids who decided to summit the peak after all. We are descending on a dry very rocky creek bed, with rocks the size of basketballs and watermelons for footing. My ankles wobble, and I keep tripping. "God, please strengthen my ankles," I pray. For good measure, I add, "Jesus, please strengthen my ankles," just in case. Then my mind goes off on matters of the trinity, the deity of Jesus, are they really one, etc. And the next moment, I am in midair. My hands go out to catch my fall, and my left knee scrapes on a rock. "God!" I think furiously. "What gives?"

"Are you OK?" Tom calls back.
"Yes," I say right away. But I stay where I am, even though there are a couple of older women behind us, and part of the reason I tripped was that I was hurrying to keep them from passing us, as we'd just passed them. I assessed. Scraped palms, a tiny bit of blood. Everything in working order. I got back to my feet and continued, gingerly down. "I just prayed for exactly this not to happen," I thought grumpily. "So much for prayer."

That's not exactly the point, I heard. Do you think you get whatever you pray for? What else could this mean?


And it came right back: that I will fall, even when my entire will is behind the hope that I won't. But that I will be OK. And even if I am not OK, I will not be alone. We are not guaranteed a life of ease, or to dodge every bullet when we chose a spiritual life, or to be the next Beatles, or even the next cranberries. But we are promised some company for the journey.

We staggered back to Marcy Dam a few hours later. This time I was determined to see what Tom was now calling "The pole forest," because these pines are so straight up and down that they look like they will soon be harvested as telephone poles. We look and look. Everywhere there are deciduous trees, ancient ones, new ones, mixed with all sorts of evergreens. And then finally, about a half mile from the parking lot we come to it. It's just a few hundred yards of forest, but the trees are uncannily uniform. And even with the occasional hiker passing us, it's eerily still, with that trademark whistling the wind makes in tall pine trees. We both stop and let the hikers pass.

"This is my church," whispers Tom.

Dreaming of the Dead

(My grandmother)

Last night I had a dream about my grandfather, a man who died in 1981 at the age of 66 from esophageal cancer. When he died, I was thirteen, and I had just discovered him. For most of the overlap of our lives, he was grouchy and clearly regarded his three granddaughters as a noisy nuisance at best and competition for his wife's attention at worst. He regularly yelled at her, and occasionally at us, so we hid from him, spying on him from behind open doors. He was mostly deaf and completely so when he didn't wear his hearing aid. He had a bad back, and I'd watch him stretch it when he thought he was alone. It made me feel strange to see him looking so vulnerable, back against the wall, lifting his arms like the Romper Room lady, wearing funny long white underwear.

He was a fire-breathing monster before his first drink. He yelled at my grandmother in public if dinner wasn't on the table by 6:30. We never ate before seven. Also, my grandmother didn't actually cook the dinner. So I am not sure what that was all about, but at any rate, I was afraid of him, and so were many people.

For Christmas 1977, after years of letting my grandmother handle the gifts to the grandkids, he gave me a stereo--a real stereo, with high quality hi-fi speakers, a synthesizer and a turn table. It was the best present I ever got, and that system followed me to college and to my first apartment, or pieces of it did anyway. He loved listening to music more than anything in the world; he worshiped at the church of Beethoven, Mozart and Schubert, filling the house with music played so loudly the house shook--remember, he was deaf. The next year, he gave me a Swiss Army Knife with every attachment imaginable. I felt seen. The last summer he was alive, I came to stay with him and my grandmother for a week in the summer. In the still-sunny evenings, he'd drink his soup--the only thing he could eat anymore since his tracheotomy--and ask me what I was reading. When I told him I loved Agatha Christie novels he smiled conspiratorially. "But just the Hercule Poirot ones, right?" And I fell in love with him.

His children deny his alcoholism. But my sister said to one of them, long after he had died, "But they had to pour whiskey into the feeding hole in his stomach every day. I think that means the doctors understood that he was an alcoholic."

Today I joined the Y. I should say "rejoined" since we are foul-weather members, always quitting in late May. Tom and I thought long and hard about joining. We don't know how much we'll really use it since we both prefer to run, walk, bike and do outdoor activities over indoor ones. I have a fabulous yoga studio, so I don't intend to bring my danurasanas there, either. But the kids love it. They need a place to swim and to learn to swim. Everyone I know is a member. And I want a Y two blocks from my house, so I see our membership as neighborly support in part.

I also saw that they have a class at 4:15 called Family Yoga. I have been fantasizing about bringing my kids to a family yoga class since before Elle was born. It's never worked out timing-wise. But today, I saw it would--I am officially looking for something to do with the kids during what is in our family lo-o-o-ong witching hours of after-school to dinnertime.

We started out eagerly enough, each of us choosing a different colored yoga mat from the closet. We set our mats up in a row, with mama in the middle. Elle was terrific, able to do every pose. Jay was predictably hilarious, sitting in half lotus, jumping around on a one-footed tree, inventing something that looked like table pose with one leg up in the air, perpendicular to the floor. Eventually all that devolved to the kids running around the room. I was told that this is usual for this class. The whole thing was a half hour. I was in heaven.

And then we stepped out of the class to put on socks, shoes, winter coats, scarves, hats--all in triplicate. And it was as if I had scalded them with hot water. "That was too short," Elle whined.
"Oh, I am so glad you liked it!" I said. "I wish it were longer too."
"Not longer, Mama! I hated it! We didn't get to run around enough. I wanted to go swimming." And she threw herself down in the middle of the hallway sobbing. Meanwhile, Jay screamed at me when I tried to put his socks on him. "Why do you DO dat, Mama? You are SO MEAN TO ME!!!" And he ran away down the hall.

As I write it now, it's pretty funny. But in the moment, all I could think about was my disappointment that my fantasy about family yoga was going up in smoke; and also that the class that had just started in the yoga room was listening, eyes closed, wishing for a peaceful pre-OM silence, to the sounds of kids berating the World's Worst Mother. So I acted like one. "I'm leaving," I announced. "See you in the parking lot." And I marched off, their coats and hats and shoes in my hand. The kids followed me screaming, "Why are you so mean, Mama! You are being SO MEAN!"


In my dream, someone said, "Granddad has come back." And I saw him first in a wheelchair, many years older, bald and round, lost-looking. But then he stood up and was transformed. He rose to a towering height, and shone like an angel. Perhaps he was one. He was the most handsome version of himself. His hair was silver and gold, and his skin shone gold, too. His eyes were clear and peaceful and kind. I came to him and put my ear to his chest. He held me for a long time. I pulled away and looked up at him. I didn't know what to say. I needed to say something--because I thought he was dead. So I finally looked him in the eye and said, "Should I be worried about you?"

He took a breath. "Well, I am abstinent," he said. "So no. But I haven't beaten cancer yet."

"You will," I told him.

I woke with the sweetest feeling about him. Even now, writing about it, I have tears in my eyes. My friend Judy, an author who writes in my Wednesday group, recently said, "When we dream of dead people, these are not really dreams." Of course, I see myself in this dream, in a very dream-like way, so I don't know. But I also feel as though I had the most wonderful visit/visitation imaginable.

I told the kids on the car ride home that I was sad we had joined the Y because of how terribly they had behaved.
"We didn't behave terribly, Mama. YOU behaved terribly."
I thought about this. They were right.
"That's true," I said. "But it doesn't solve the problem. I think we all need to just take a big break from each other between pick up from school and dinner time. We're all too cranky."
"I'm not cranky!" screamed Elle. "You're cranky! I want Dada!" And she collapsed again on the floor sobbing.

I gave up. I started to make dinner, pulling food out of the fridge with one hand, texting Tom with my other. "Please do not go to the store. Just come home now."
He texted back: "Need to not come home. Need time to myself. Need to come home after you feed the kids dinner." It was a conspiracy. He was going to leave me with them, me whom they hated. Possibly they would have killed me by the time they got home. No, that wasn't realistic. They wouldn't have killed me, but they would probably steal away in the middle of the night to marry men from the motor trade like the girl in "She's Leaving Home."

I started to pray. Help, help, help, like that.

At that moment the phone rang. It was my father. I took the phone into the bathroom, burst into tears and told him briefly about the bad afternoon and then about the dream about my grandfather, his father. As I sobbed, Jay came in and threw his arms around my legs, patting the backs of them consolingly.

"That's wonderful," said my father. "You're lucky to have had that dream."

"Daddy's home!"shrieked Elle, and sure enough, in came Tom to the scene of chaos, me with a tear stained face and the kids attached to my legs, my father under my ear. And I knew we'd all be ok for the foreseeable future.

My grandfather believed in God. I didn't see this myself, and when I learned as a teenager that he was the believer and my saintly grandmother was the atheist, it threw my straight Protestant concepts for a loop. But now I get it. Saintly people don't need God, they don't need church. It's those of us who wrestle with our rage, who look for Spirit in a bottle, who fall down again and again in our relationships, and who are saved by saying we are sorry--we're the ones who need church, just as the sick are the ones who need a hospital. And on good days, we are the ones who see angels.