Memoir Excerpt #3
up the lake and into the mountains
I may have set an alarm on my phone to make sure of it - I don’t quite remember - but I woke up early the following morning, at the crack of dawn. I remember actually sleeping okay that night, on my back on my yoga mat in the entryway to the public restroom facility of the park on the shore of Lake Chelan. I probably got up to pee once. But I would remember if it was a sleepless night, a hellish torment in my view. Instead I remember waking up fresh with the new day, gathering my belongings and promptly but peacefully walking out of the park.
As it was the dawn of a summer day, I still had a few hours until my Lady of the Lake sailing was due to depart. I ambled about a nearby neighborhood leisurely. It was hilly and dry. The local birds sounded as the sun alighted on the pine trees and bushes of the area. Though I also heard a car passing here and there on the busier road this neighborhood splintered off from, I alone walked the streets. I saw a hummingbird buzzing around someone’s fruit trees, and then I saw a couple deer enjoying the morning as well. Corrected: I alone walked the streets, bipedally.
I remember feeling quite happy, content in the moment as well as excited by the prospect of my adventure in this un-personally-explored land continuing to unfold. The ambient temperature of the outdoors on this midsummer morning was perfect. Humidity level: likely 0%. What a refreshing change of pace from twenty-four abrasively muggy East coast summers. I drank in the fresh, clean, piney scent of the morning in a place I’d never been. It is very special to me to wake up in a new place for the first time, to experience morning there for the first time. Though my trip started in wet, western Washington, I was now firmly central. It was drier, the landscape was not ‘evergreen’ as the state slogan promised, but rather, it looked more to me like southern California than the dripping wet moss-ridden multi-green temperate rainforest I was expecting. No matter, I thought: here’s reality, here’s what it’s really like out here. And I can’t argue with that. The fool clings doggedly to his expectations as he meets with the immovable object of external reality. Wiser, I slough off my expectations with the speed and nonchalance of an improv actor responding to the unexpected input; I lean into it and work with it as I adore it, because I must. It is what is, after all. And to argue with what is, I learned from Eckhart Tolle’s The Power of Now (read while at the ashram), is a recipe for suffering. At least, I learned that particular sentence, from Tolle’s book. I’d learned the lesson myself, in my own experience, ten thousand times before that.
