Hello from Montana

Hello From Montana,

The sky really is big here. The colors breathe from blue to grey to blue again.

I keep imagining myself like folded steel. Heat, fold, press, fold, press, heat. The days feel most like spirals. The same routine but each day is different. I carry a flame of hope within me. I feel more fragile than before. Like if I broke I would never be the same. I’m not the same. Every day I’m breaking and realigning the script of what I think I ought to do given each moment-to-moment circumstance. The script of where I am and where I’m going, what I’m made of, and what I’m made to be comes into and out of form like warm putty in nervous hands. I consider the round-and-round-ness of my thoughts like a quiet vortex in shallow water.

Attention. Awareness. To notice the script at all! I once dreamt I stared into a mirror so intently I saw the human eye reflected in front of me as a separate body and I wondered where I went and how I knew I’d lost track of myself. My day is full of songs like these like a song stuck in my head but it’s a dot pushed and wafted between a landscape of hurricanes full of thoughts I’ve been meaning to be rid of for a very long time, but without them I am bleached linoleum blankness.

These vortices which I resent for holding me back are what bring me comfort. Too much comfort and there is no growth. Too much growth and there is no comfort. Perhaps, just my being alive shows how balanced it’s been for me.

—

The heater turns on when it gets too cold in this room and I’m contemplating how my place in the world right now is so comfortable. I consider the cost of the systems paid by my ancestors and neighbors to bring me a heater which turns on when the room begins to chill.

Sometimes I leave the room to be outside. I walk along the hill, between the trees, and under the sky. On my walk back to my room from the hill, I noticed some mushrooms growing on the path. The mushrooms showing above the ground are a fruit of the mycelium under the ground. I understand mycelium to be a conduit for trees to send signals back and forth. On my walk back I imagine the path to be alive, I imagine the path’s awareness of me. Or the trees awareness of me.Trees move towards light. I wonder how aware of that they are. Or if they just do move toward like like I breathe. I wonder if tree awareness falls into vortices like me. I wonder if vortices of thought shape the trees. 



—-

I’ve been sitting in the water of the lake at least once each week. Just deep enough to sit comfortably with water up to my neck. My skin hurts with chill at first when I enter the cold water, I find that walking into it slowly my skin temperature adjusts and once the cold stops hurting, I notice many more intricacies of the temperature gradient of the lake.

I can wade in up to my shins quickly enough, and my thighs I notice are more sensitive. I get halfway, then the cold laps some pretty sharp sensations up my inner thigh, especially as the waves go up and down, they challenge me to walk deeper by stretching the edges of my willingness to enter the cold water.

I’m up to my waist now and my legs are comfortable; the next sensitive area my attention rallies around is my belly. Working my belly in, every inch is hard-won, and the lolling of the lake oscillates between being above my “edge” where my body is still uncomfortable in the cold, and below my edge where my lower half is adjusted to the cold.

I take long strides along the lake edge, rather than into it, so each step brings me only slightly deeper, keeping a constant discomfort as one inch of skin adjusts to the cold at a time.  Then I’m up the pain of cold to my chest and I rest there for a while, belly submerged. My forearms go in and out of the water, hurting, getting used to the cold, then feeling numb even though by now my feet are adjusted and delighting in the energy of the water.

As I walk in, I consider my boyhood memories of being yelled at “just dive in! like a band-aid! It’s going to be more painful if you stretch it out like that!” I consider my experience now, allowing for a longer, apparently “more painful” experience. Is it more painful? Haven’t I chosen this way? I am keenly aware of the discomfort of the lake’s rippling surface as it challenges my willingness to be in its embrace. I feel supreme resistance to the thought of submerging, remembering the traumatic urge to breathe deeply in the cold. I consider submerging for some time, and finally decide to drop my entire chest up to my shoulders into the water. It hurts, but in a minty fresh way. I feel the hurt of the cold subside and eventually the thought of dunking my head sounds appealing, so I do that. It doesn’t hurt and it doesn’t feel like I’m conquering fear. Final submergence feels like an indulgence, in contrast to the rest of my painstaking wading.

I swim with delight, aware of the slightly warmer layer of water towards the top of the lake, and an increasing coldness gradient down to my toes. I feel the joy of my engaged muscles feeling themselves move against the gentle resistance of the water. I play with the sounds and feelings of the water as I splay out my fingers and cut my hand through the water column like a sword through the air. I think it should be fun to splash, but I do not splash. Instead I slow down and watch the ripples of the surface. I slow down more, I notice debris and the way they float so quickly bobbing back and forth. I notice an ant on the water’s surface. One leg is in the water, but the other legs are spread out enough to get purchase on the surface tension. I decide to push him back to shore with my benevolent breath. So I slowly walk my breath behind him, blowing on the surface until he reaches shore. He’s washed onto land and I think I lose him for a bit, then I notice him crawl up and make his way up hill. I watch him for a while.

Eventually I grow a satisfied weariness and am called to sit. The sun feels warm, but my skin is still acclimated to the cold, so I sit in the water up to my neck.

Here I am sitting on the bottom of the lake, head above water, taking notice of the energy of my body. There is stress and I work my way through, inviting whatever I can to relax into the sit, feeling gravelly lakebottom hold me. I notice as I relax, my core tells my body to keep my head above water, and I let this happen as unconsciously as I can, like my breath. My awareness gently takes up and releases control of breathing, pushing, pulling, reacting to the tide. Now the lake is playing with me, the energies up against and away from my body’s need for air. I am a third party watching the dance between the lake be a lake and my body be a body. In flashes, I lose track of the difference and allow the circumstances to be.

Then I am reminded my goal is to have a oneness experience with the lake and I wonder how I am doing and if I can achieve this more deeply and more quickly than now. I consider my walk into the water, my body’s adjustment, the stories and memories which came up as I went in, and how often my mind has gone to the memory of the last time I got this cold in the lake and went to take a hot shower. What a rush that was and what a rush that will be soon.

I go back to trying to be at one with the lake, then I think of how trying to do that makes it harder to do, then I think about how I want a hot shower, then how I shouldn’t want a hot shower because it’s indulgent and comfortable, and how the discomfort of sitting in the lake is fruitful. Then I recognize the discomfort as an expression to myself of my capacity for self-discipline. Then I think about how great I am for having self-discipline and how I’d like to be more disciplined in other areas of my life.

Each cycle of thought between the hot shower, self-discipline narrative, oneness narrative, pride narrative, shame narrative, each arc of swirl into the next, I’m able to notice how each narrative inspires the following narrative, round and round. For a brief moment I’m able to track these thoughts just as I watched my body hold itself up in the lake. Layers of awareness! This sparks a new dimension of the thought-vortex, and eventually my body tells me I’m cold enough to have a shower because it starts to shiver.

—-

The hot shower after a lake-sit is very different than a hot shower just out of bed. In the lake-sit-hot-shower, I consider the profound pleasure afforded by discomfort. I remember the supreme resistance to diving into the water all-at-once. The aversion to discomfort. How that same aversion to discomfort arises both in instances of stepping into the lake as well as into my emotional growth.

Then the idea which comes up, saying “you need to be better at overcoming discomfort so you can grow the most in the least amount of time”. I view this as an industrialist idea which exists within me, and I allow myself to be uncomfortable about being afraid of discomfort. This first discomfort of discomfort is the first step towards walking forward into the lake where I intend to flex my body and show my dance moves while I am alive. To let go, let my body keep itself upright, to let whatever parts can relax to relax, let the buoyancy of the water hold me up, let the lake gravel keep me still, and notice the temperature gradient and all the littlest ways that the lake is.