Gems: Friends, Fall Colors and a Lake

Yesterday's hike was a chance to walk through golden Aspens with two friends. The three of us don't have that opportunity as often as I would like.

We stepped through golden leaves above our heads and beneath our feet. We remembered other hikes, other times we'd walked those paths.

The path to Gem Lake is steep in places, but just under 2 miles. We felt so good when we reached the lake. The sign just beyond reminded us that the trek on to Balanced Rock was over two miles beyond--not such a short hike after all.

We have walked some of life's long roads together too. Some have been bumpy, rocky, with hills that were hard to climb. These women represent deep friendships that any would be fortunate to have. Others have walked rutted and muddy roads with me. Others have shared my spiritual journey. But these two have shared hikes that allowed me to walk through fears, climb paths I would never have thought I could, in reality and metaphorically. They have been with me through life-changing spiritual awakenings--and during the upheavals that have accompanied those awakenings. Another friend commented recently on how often sadness comes with peace--that giving up of a dream--with an end to striving for something that's time has passed. Wisdom that is hard earned.

We relished the beauty of the fall colors, the aspens that were approaching red-orange. The hike to Gem Lake seemed new and familiar at the same time. Our cameras gave us new eyes. We marveled at the small and the grand. It's not balanced rock that drew us to that spot, but the grandeur of fall's forest. And we followed each others steps as we made the walk out. Our separate paths came together for a time of joy and wonder.

I am blessed to have wise women friends.

Awe and Wonder

The ones of me was taken by my hiking partner, Judith Chandler, on her camera.
Awe and wonder -- and there's no way -- even had my camera's batteries not died as we reached the huge meadow we had aimed for above Black Lake in RMNP -- that photographs convey the vastness and the stark glory of that landscape. The golden grasses this time of year enhance the rocky surfaces. The mountains above (which are beyond our climbing abilities) stand in stark shadow over the streams, lakes, red bushes, and golden grasses.

Some might see this as too barren, too stark. Why it speaks to my soul is not something I can explain. There are four named lakes in this meadowland. On this hike, we did not visit them. Instead we simply reveled in the splendor of the area. I sat and absorbed while my friend took photographs. We marveled. It was exhilarating. God's creation is marvelous!

Then we had to hike out--down steps, passing by Black Lake, across meadows and down more steps, past Jewel and Mills Lakes, on legs that were feeling pushed. The walk out seemed longer than the six or so miles we had hiked in. That's often the case. For the splendor and awe, I was blessed by my body's ability to make the trek, blessed by the company of my dear hiking companion, and blessed by the experience of my inner child's wonder.

Some experiences in nature are beyond words. We are blessed! I am grateful!

Slogging Through

Slogging through life seems a good title for where mine has been lately. The photo, taken by my hiking companion on her camera, is of me slogging my way through the krummholz in a high meadow on last Friday's hike. A friend reading one of my last blogs dubbed me a "wrestlin' woman."

Wrestlin' and slogging both sound like challenging ways to make it through life. However, getting to the feelings of my early childhood seems to require wrestlin' and slogging.

The gold in this part of the journey has been unexpected. I did not consider that I might understand not only the decisions I made as a child, but which of my basic needs (as a child) motivated those decisions. Little Margaret, who met her Daddy's inappropriate needs as best she could, did it to gain affection--a natural and basic child's need. This realization allowed me to finally clear my guilt about heeding Daddy's requests and doing the best I could with them.

I had felt responsible for Mother's emotions and wanted to make her feel better. As a child, I believed I had that power--if only I did the right thing. I found myself acting that out in a friendship--surprised that this part of me hadn't healed. And naturally I had engendered hurt and resentment in myself and my friend. With Mother if I made her happy, if I helped her be well, surely I'd get the love and affection I desired and needed.

I had experienced Mother's jealousy during childhood. That jealousy erupted with venom over the years at me, then at my daughter, and even a friend's daughter as each entered puberty. I never believed I would understand what triggered those emotions. A recent experience reminded me that sisters (I don't have one) are sometimes jealous of each other. Then a light bulb went on. Mother was jealousy of her sister--four years older. We saw that jealousy, not that she could admit it, but this must have been especially strong when her sister entered puberty. We must have triggered those emotions as we reached that period of our lives. When it happened to me, I thought it was about me, but by the time it happened to my friend's daughter, it was clear that it wasn't about any of us. I'm aware that when I feel stronger emotions than make sense, it's about something old. I realized that was true with Mother, but only now can I see the probable cause.

Helping that little girl part of me deeply know that she couldn't heal Mother is a huge relief. I can finally forgive myself for not making Mother well.

All this slogging and wrestlin' counts. Hopefully, I'll put these and other insights together in a way that will help others. If I do, it will be their understandings of their feelings, with the Spirit's help, that will heal. My work could only jog those realizations.

In peace.

What we see -- and clarity

We see through the lenses of our experience. Had you been with me when I took these photographs, you might have aimed your camera at a different scene. You might not have noticed the moss that was growing on the top of a boulder beside the Black Lake trail (in RMNP). You might have had your eyes on the trail--or on the stream on the other side of the path, or on the mountains ahead. The moss might have seemed unworthy of a photograph. (Moss housed the little people I pretended understood my life as a little girl, but that's for another writing.).

I've brought out colors and closed in on details by enhancing these photographs. It was fun. The water's edges turned blue violet as I brought out the green grasses growing around the boulder. The day I took the picture, I barely noticed the green and the water looked white as it rushed over the rocks.

How and what we see makes such difference in our attitude about each day. I'm skilled at finding the beauty, the good, and letting that be my focus. That has often meant ignoring peril, and not planning for illness or old age. A friend once said that I saw clearly the danger ahead. Then, he said, I walked right into the fire, as if I didn't know the house was burning. My spiritual journey has forced me to see evil as well as good with clarity. I didn't find a photograph to represent evil, but the rocks and pebbles in the bottom of the stream are brought into a much clearer focus (see the same picture in earlier blogs) by cropping and enlarging their images. The fall image, which I couldn't resist putting in, shows the rocks with clarity without enhancement!

Notice that in the photos with bright light, there is also darkness. The darkness looks like a void so the light will stand out. Are there days when the darkness obscures the light? When darkness would color the bright--take away from it? And what about color? Can we enjoy the gold leaves without remembering the cold, dark days that will follow?

Last Saturday, when the fall photograph was taken, we started up Boulder Canyon in light fog and mist. We didn't know what the weather would be when we got to the Hessie Trailhead. We had been told that the aspen leaves had turned beautiful yellows and golds. My positive thoughts were that they always looked brighter against gray clouds. That way of thinking reflects the way I coped in childhood--look for the pink skies that transformed the gray farm buildings, suck on the sweetness from clover "straws." My friend didn't want to back out of her commitment to our hike (as I had expected her to).

As we drove past about 6500 ft. elevation (Boulder is 5430 ft.), the sun blazed down on us. When we got to Nederland, we stopped for my friend to buy sunglasses. She hadn't expected to need hers. The aspens were glorious, the sun warm and the fall light's slant was magical. What a reward for going through the fog and mist--for persevering on the path!

Fr. Thomas Keating says, and I'm paraphrasing, that without evil we could not begin to understand the depths of Divine love. We might also say that darkness enhances the light.

On my journey of spiritual and emotional healing, I have days like this one, when fatigue and dis-ease signal emotional memories. Those new on the path at our meditation group last evening sought to console and make things easier for me. But I've been on this journey long enough to know that for whatever it is that's pushing hard (for more time than it usually takes) to come to the light, that after the encounter with new clarity, I will experience light in a new way. The fall light, yes it's that, for I'm at least in the fall of my life. It can come sooner, but for me it didn't.

Needing to see clearly the evil perpetrated to and around me during childhood has meant letting go of perceptions that comforted me. My whitewashed Daddy has had to fall away. Memories I had secured in a hidden storage place have needed to come clearly into focus. During this journey of healing and spiritual growth, I've also needed clarity about my own shortcomings. I've been given the insight to understand from where my reactivity to certain people, institutions and events come.

Clarity allows for seeing the shapes of the rocks over which the water flows. It allows for understanding the water's depths, its currents, and its power. It calls for noticing where the rocks on the path are solid and sustaining and where they are wet and slippery and could easily cause a fall. Clarity calls for seeing and feeling our buried wounds, letting them rise to the surface for healing and evacuation. It calls for seeing with compassion our shortcomings, our own tendencies to cause others pain

Then, with the non-dual thinking that Franciscan monk Richard Rohr proclaims, I must hold the good rocks and the slippery ones in the same focus--understanding they have different surfaces, are planted in different ways, that neither is always good or always bad. With rocks, I find it easy to see. With people, holding their good and evil deeds as part of the whole has been more difficult.

My memory of scripture as contained in the Bible is mostly from the verses that Mother quoted (for various reasons). In the first chapter of John, there's a verse about the light shining in the darkness--and the darkness not blotting it out. That's how I see this journey of seeing clearly--being aware of evil as well as good, but not letting the evil overcome the good. We have no power to change that which we cannot or choose not to see.

(The actual verse for purists who might be reading this: "The light shines in the darkness, and the darkness did not overcome it." John 1:5. NRSV) The King James version, the one with which I grew up, says "the darkness comprehended it not." That translation didn't speak to me with the same clarity.

Real Change

Awareness, dedication, perseverance--big words that my Enneagram "thought for today" used to describe what we as individuals need for real change. Those words describe for me what it takes for us to change our habits so that we can protect this amazing and wonderful earth that provides us a home too.

As I look back over this year's hiking season, I feel so blessed to have had the opportunity to enjoy the beauty of our mountains, lakes and streams on many amazing paths. The wildflower season was one of spectacular beauty and lasted well into August.



We are losing more of our lodgepole pines to the pine bark beet. Our forests won't be the same. I don't know if we humans created conditions that allowed those beetles to flourish. I hope not. Perhaps our forests needed change and this is nature's way.

I am grateful for all who have hiked those paths with me, especially Judith, my faithful trail companion for these past ten summers. I give thanks for my feet, legs, knees and hips, that after 72 years still take me into paths above treeline and allow me to commune with lakes and meadows such as ones I've shown on earlier blogs. I could promise not to push them hard, but that might be a promise I wouldn't keep even this week when we look forward to a hike we've missed the last couple of years.

The season is changing. The aspens in their glory predict that their leaves will soon fall. As a child I believed the trees in our woods, that like Britain's Prince Charles, I talked to on a regular basis, needed a rest. I did feel a touch of sadness when their leaves of color--more orange and red than in our mountain forests--fell to the ground. I gathered my favorites--those with gold, orange and red with even a touch of green--and pressed them into a book so I could remember their beauty during the winter when the trees lost their decorations.

On Saturday's drive to the Hessie trailhead beyond Eldora, we saw trees whose leaves had already fallen, as well as glorious hillsides dotted with splashes of bright yellow aspens tucked into the pine forests. Those bare trees reminded me that we expect our first signs of snow in the mountains before this month is past.

As I think of the seasons of the year, I also think of seasons of life. I'm certainly less decorative than I was in earlier seasons (assuming I was then!). I'm slower in speech and no longer keep the frenetic pace I kept for so many years. To many, I'm old. Interesting--I don't think of myself that way. When I smile, many of my wrinkles disappear (briefly) so my photos look younger than I look to those who see me when I'm tired or sad or stressed.

Oh yes, I titled this writing "real change." Today I'm grateful for time to let the little girl Margaret, who suffered at the hands of those who were supposed to protect, grieve. I'm grateful for time to let her know how sorry I am for what happened to her, for time to help her heal. I'll add another word to those in the Enneagram thought--surrender. I'm grateful for time to surrender to the process of Divine healing--the healing that brings real change.

Unexpected Color (in weeds?!)

Have you ever felt like a weed--the one who was ignored while the flowers got all the attention and praise? Or are you a weed as a wild one--doing things that others dare not do?

Growing into my teen years, I was definitely a weed--skinny, underdeveloped (still am in some places!), and shy when thrown into a sea of new students in a big town junior high and high school. Mother didn't let me forget that I had skinny legs, didn't need a bra, and that my shoulder blades stuck out. I would come to enjoy my redder than blond hair, but Mother had wanted brunette, brown-eyed children like Dad (she forgot that he had 4 reddish-haired siblings as well as the three others who were dark). I wanted that dark hair and those big brown eyes and felt like the biggest weed around those who had that coloring. At the new schools, I stood on the sidelines socially. I was the weed in the midst of a flock of flowers. Like a bee, I was attracted to the flowers and had no interest in hanging out with other weeds.

As an adult, I was more the weed who didn't mind standing out by having career positions that men usually filled. Often it didn't make me popular, but I didn't mind being different in that way. Had I changed colors from the masses? Yes, but they weren't the colors of transformation. They were the colors that made me feel better than.

The weeds/plants pictured above were all green earlier this summer. Their sizes and shapes were different, but they were recognizable as the same species.

As we develop spiritually and shed our need to be who someone else wanted us to be, as we allow our divinity to shine through, our colors change. We can be the person we were planted here on earth to be--the colors that are ours. As the plants pictured above, we can be as different as our talents. We still belong to the same family--that of human beings, but our unique selves define our shapes and sizes.

I love the colors of the "weeds" in these photos. They made me think of our colors as human beings. Do we show up as light when we walk into a room? Do we bring darkness and gloom with us? A woman recently told me that I brought so much of the Spirit into the small room where we were meeting that it got in her way. An interesting concept--right? Perhaps she was in the Spirit's way? It was, however, a different way for me to be seen.

This morning I am aware of the origins of a couple of my huge pet peeves--ways that others irritate me by being their false selves. I hardly have room to talk. Centering prayer continues to allow me to be in touch with my various false-self parts--to notice them until I can't stand myself in those areas, to allow my opinions, anger and jealousy formed in early childhood to come to the light and be available for Divine healing. It's work--sometimes worth a laugh, often causing tears--but transformation isn't intended to be easy.

As I look at the beautiful colors of fall plants and leaves and know that they are about to fall and die until another season, I ask the Almighty to let those false-self parts that are present to me this morning die too. I pray that in another season, I will be more compassionate with my fellow travellers on this journey.

Making Peace

Peace with change, peace by accepting our powerlessness and giving over to the Divine power to bring about peace--in our lives, in our communities, in our country and in the world--this calls to me at this time in the life cycle of nature, and with the loss around us here in Boulder County.

I acknowledge the need for this peace on the anniversary of 9/11. I know this peace with the passing of a truly great Episcopal priest who was the Rector at St. John's in Boulder for 25 years and a priest in the church for over 50 years. I'm praying for hope and peace for all of those who lost so much in the fires which are not yet out in our mountains.

All of us who love our mountains so deeply will suffer in this loss, but in different ways than those who lost homes--some that had been rooted in our canyons since the late 1800s. My favorite drive up to Gold Hill to enjoy the golden aspens is now gray with ash and ruin, but I'll drive up another canyon to enjoy the aspens. I'll look for another road. Others must look for another home.

The fall color show brings with it the realization that those leaves will fall, dry up, and the berries will either be eaten or turn black and drop to the ground. Fall depressed Mother. She stood at the kitchen window and watched as "her birds" ate their last meals for the season, readying for their flights to warmer climates. She had difficulty enjoying the red, orange, and yellow maple leaves as she projected us into winter. I try to be present to each day's beauty--and I'm able most days. My camera pushes me to see beauty in all things, all people, all places.

Our blue Colorado skies arch over blackened trees and smoldering ashes where homes once stood. I can remember when those blue skies angered me as I dealt with loss. How dare the maple leaves put on such a show when I am feeling such pain, I thought the fall my brother was killed in an automobile wreck. How dare the sky be so blue and the roses so lovely as long buried memories spued around me, destroying who I had thought I was? The artist whose show and party is celebrated tonight is worrying that people won't want to attend because they are grieving their losses.

Peace for me is about holding the dual realities of death and destruction together with the hopes and joys of new life and unfolding blessings on our paths. Without the losses in my life, I would not have had the compassion I needed to listen to the woman who was crying as she chose new linens in a Boulder store this morning. She was ending a 24-year-old marriage, knowing it was the right thing for her, yet unable to stem the tears flowing down her cheeks.
Without unearthing the fear I had as a young child when Mother was too sick to take care of Bill and me and Daddy had gone out to the fields, I wouldn't understand the fear of not knowing how to do what was needed, the fear that whatever I did, it wouldn't be right, be enough. I wouldn't understand the sister who wants to scream at her younger siblings to shut up when they asked for their Mother, one who can't for whatever reason, be available.

I'm allowing for grief and loss--emotions of the child Margaret whose Mother was crying so loudly that she couldn't hear her daughter--to bubble up from within so that I can hold them up for Divine healing, thus allowing me to be more peaceful. My contribution--the only one I know how to make--is to allow God's peace to emanate through me to those with whom I come in contact in my daily life. God's peace--available to all, not to one religious group and not another, but to all. Blessed peace from within.