It’s as if there has been a malicious magnetic field polarizing the needle of the compass and confusing direction. We have been pushed to navigate a sea of disorienting currents with unsuspecting sails billowed full and rent apart by unexpected winds…or set adrift with no wind at all in a dead calm and no visible stars from which to sight a sextant… adrift “all at sea”.
Some have ignored it out of ignorance, both real and willful, some have dismissed it out of hubris or from misplaced and misinformed allegiances, all to the detriment of the innocent. Some have panicked and in the dissonant clammer have lost their vision their purpose and even their hope. Many have failed to remember there are those older who have weathered storms much worse than this, and there are those younger who even now endure pain, injustice and loss much deeper than our struggle, our inconvenience.
When the days are too long…or the days are too short… when I slip from optimism to a skeptics burden…when I grow distraught or sad witnessing a tide washing away another piece of humanity’s empathy…when I waste precious moments longing for “what was” or watch with dismay the callous indifference of those who too soon try to return to what lead us here… my wife again quietly reminds me… “nothing is permanent”. Nothing is permanent..and so we try to move forward “seeking the sublime”.
From this year of living dangerously, this year of living differently, this year of dilemma and discord we found ourselves negotiating a different way of navigating. We chose to postpone our thru hike of the Appalachian Trail, we paused or shortened our travel, we clung closer to our family when we could, and isolated and meditated when we needed. And though like many, stress and frustration was often heavy, we tried to keep going. We found purpose working on an old house once owned by the family that built the lumber yard it is perched above in a mountain town imbedded deep in the Appalachians. A place to be, a place to work and a place to contemplate. And though our journeys were shorter, restricted and deliberate in their cautious isolation, we still found a way to hike over 1,000 miles, stare across an ocean from its shore, summit mountains, watch bison slumber and lumber in fields, and elk graze next to us in deep woodlands. We ambled through landscapes of jeweled pools, hot springs and erupting geysers. We traveled through deep red rock canyons and across bronze glazed plains. We weathered blinding snow, thunder storms, heat waves, and even a haboob sand storm! We saw skies of every color, stirring sun rises and stunning cloud formations, glittering ribbons of rivers, and we slept under stars…so many stars! So even in this difficult year there was still much beauty to see and so much more to be thankful for.
And while our goals and projects have often been stymied, observations and research impeded, and our writing and sharing what we have observed and what we have learned has waned…our yearning to immerse ourselves back onto the road and into the wild has persisted, and to move forward we are gradually learning and adjusting to new ways of navigating.
As we begin to venture out again we are learning that we have all in some way been changed. No one will be traveling the way they did before…no one will be going back to the same place. We all will need new navigations. And in these new navigations there are new challenges, new possibilities and new hopes. And so we move forward Seeking the Sublime.