2 posts tagged “reflection”

So this last weekend, I ventured into well known but nigh forgotten territory with a couple of friends.  In spite of a late start (about 12 1/2 hours late), we made it to the Deep Creek trailhead of the Great Smoky Mountains fairly early in the day.

After a lunch of pizza reheated in foil on the engine block, we double checked our packs and hit the trail.  The noise and blaring colors of the main camp and the river tubers that populated faded quickly as we hauled ourselves and our supplies up the mountain.  The trail was in excellent condition, and the cool mountain air and fresh stream water (filtered) helped me, the least fit among us, make it the four miles through gorgeous mixed forest to the campsite.  With Gatlinburg and Cherokee N.C. not far away at all, we found beauty and peace in the song of Deep Creek herself, rushing past our little camp.

In mere minutes I was in the stream, splashing about and collecting camp water.  We set up our tents, gathered kindling for our very reluctant fire-- we were, after all, in the Smokies, a wet region on the best of days, even without the morning storms.  That afternoon we threw our rations together and made chicken and rice with gravy over the open fire.  There was more than the three of us could eat.  Dinner was followed by three terrific cigars, provided lovingly by my Dearheart. 

The evening lingered gently and slowly into night.  A sprinkling of rain refreshed the forest at dusk, and sleep came easily, even in a tent I could barely stretch out in diagonally.

The next day dawned bright and beautifully.  I rose in what I can only guess was the mid-morning and hit the river again.  Later, my roomie Derek joined me in the creek for yet another splashful expedition.  We traipsed about freely, examiner the river stones, rich with quartz and mica, talked and laughed.

I remembered and recounted to him an encounter in Nashville years before.  It was the nineties, and I was attending an arts ad crafts festival at Centennial Park.  I encountered there several Native American crafters, one of them a Cherokee shaman with whom I had a long conversation.  On parting, he said offhandedly, "Goodbye River Bear, it was nice to meet you." 

The name has always been with me, lodged solidly in the back of my head.  It has only rarely come up in all these years.  At the time, though, it had resonated.

And there, in the serenity and gorgeous green of the Smokies, a place where I had spent many happy, wandering hours in my youth, it returned to me.  The bear is most certainly my totem.  I am indeed a defender and teacher.  There may be some lion in there somewhere, according to a South-African shaman, but really, I'm a bear.  More precisely, a River Bear.

That night, we drank and laughed and finished our cigars.  We told silly stories and had what can best be described as wanton "man fun", wreathed in smoke and primitive celebration.  The next day, we broke camp leisurely and made our way down the four mile track to civilization.  Much of our return trip followed another river, one full of rafters and kayakers, which I intend to visit soon. 

The whole experience was so invigorating it's hard to describe.  It put me even more in mind of myself, which has been a major theme lately.  Another step on the path back to my path has been taken, and I'd like to thank Chris and Derek, and my Dearheart as well, for helping make it possible.  I want to thank the National Park Commission for setting the land aside for such uses, the Cherokee for so carefully and lovingly preserving it before them and the goddess for building the mountains and moving them across the world that they might be loved by we narcissistic, hurried Americans in need of memories old and new.

  

I find myself wondering, from time to time, how like other people I am.  Naturally, everyone is unique (which is just another way of saying no one is) in spite of themselves.  Knowing this, I have been repeatedly enraptured by the fascinating traits of others, almost universally to my detriment in the long run, since it turns out that the differences lead only to disintegration.

Disintegrate: –verb (used without object)

1.	to separate into parts or lose intactness or solidness; break up; deteriorate: The old book is gradually disintegrating with age.

Let me tell you, I've done a lot of that.  The constant struggle to build a life with security and meaning has been a long, hard fight indeed.  It surely can't help that those I chose to do it with have had no real understanding of me.  Sure, they've understood my passion, my creativity, my erudition even, but rarely has anyone successfully contemplated the whole.

Some facts about me:
 

• I am a troubled soul, but that doesn't make me a loser, no matter how hard one tries to manifest that belief.
• My personal evolution has slowed to a crawl more than once, but has never halted or failed.
• Hopefulness and realism are forever battling within me, but my neural pathways know what is true in my quantum reality.
• That your reality is not my own does not make you a superior individual by any leap of logic or faith.  The inverse is also true.
• I do in fact hold a grudge.  Moreover, I nurture and feed a grudge until it bifurcates infinitely into a veritable army.  More importantly, however, I have reasons for my grudges, and should those reasons be allayed, I will certainly and gladly forgive.
• I am a source and subject of inspiration, and this is perhaps the sole factor in my life's worthiness.  Without that, all my loves and works would be for naught. 
  

The depth of my reflection turns out to separate me significantly from the masses. It separates me even more from those with whom I have sought connection, as those fascinating variations in human nature that draw me like moon to earth have never been balanced in such a way as to maintain gravity until very lately. 

As I have previously mentioned, I do not deal well with disintegration.  While there are many arenas in which the inevitability of change is welcome, my personal life is not one of them.  What I am really getting at is that I have never fully disintegrated at all, which has left me in need of impossible reintegration, which I neither expect nor want, but nonetheless leaves a vacancy of spirit. 

In the end, there is no way to alter this reality.  I seem to have managed the only possible positive reaction, which is to embrace it.  While the immediate effects are generally destructive, I eventually learn more about myself and, by extension, everything else.

But, having reflected and processed, I do not forget.  I never forget.  In fact, I never complete even the internal integration. 

Though it pains me, I'm OK with that.

There.  Self-indulgent post complete.  For now.