Wed, Apr 24, Preparing for Departure

Dear Trail Friends,

I begin this post sitting here at home on Orcas Island with spring sunshine coming in through my window. As our trip beckons, my heart lingers with Orcas in spring time and with our beloved 8 month old kittens Magic and Mystery (photo below).



Chris and I will leave tomorrow by ferry (and car) for Seattle, then fly to Amsterdam for a one-day visit. From there we travel by car to Germany, then fly to Prague.

"Exploring Freud's World," our group tour (including family members, friends, and former students) with Chris lecturing, starts May 3 in Prague and ends May 18 in London.

I begin this blog with some ambivalence. I learned to blog on the Pacific Crest Trail from another hiker. I hiked that glorious trail, and subsequent trails, living so close to my own heart and soul, held in the arms of the sky and the earth and the trees, that the blogs spilled out from a place of pure gratitude. I was awed by the beauty of the trail, and by the fact that my blogs were able to share a little of my solitary joy with others.

I know that an adventure that involves civilization and the presence of other human beings will be much more difficult for me to blog. I doubt my ability to make the deep connections with myself and with others, with Freud's physical world and with Chris's lectures, that I will need to write about the experience in the way that it deserves. I accept the challenge reluctantly, but I do so because Chris's lectures about Freud have been, in their way, as important a blessing in my life as the trail. I want to honor that. If I can, I want to share a little of the magic and richness I have found in Chris's Freud lectures.

I don't know how to describe that richness. An image comes to mind from a course Chris taught on Freud in the 1980s at the Jung Institute in Switzerland. Her final lecture was on Freud and Death.  I remember the spell she cast, the sense of the presence of death, of our rich and conflicted relationship as human beings with death and with life. I was filled with simultaneous feelings of peaceful submission and daringly defiant adventure. While the audience applauded enthusiastically a young man (who had already been diagnosed with the advanced lung cancer that would soon end his life) lept up onto the stage. He held Chris in his arms and they wept.

She began her first lecture in that series by telling a story that we have both told many times since. She described our first visit, the week before, to the Freud museum in London. As we marveled at Freud's vast collection of antiquities and searched for various mythological figures, a psychoanalyst from San Francisco joined us in Freud's consulting room. "I had no idea," the young man said, "that Freud was such a Jungian."

Though I remember little of the details or content of Chris's Freud lectures, I know that Freud - Chris's Freud - came alive for me, and that I was inspired to read more of his work. I also know that when we prepared to make our move from California to Washington, as I faced my mother's illness and approaching death along with my fear of changes and uprooting, and grappled with grief that seemed bigger than I could deal with, it was Freud and his consulting room that entered my imagination and offered me the support and safety I needed. We bought our Orcas Island house in 1991, and we began to visit during the winter holidays and in the summer, moving to Orcas full-time in fall of 1994, (on the 10th anniversary of our vows ceremony). For five and a half years, from 1992 through 1997, I met with Professor Freud daily, five days a week, an hour a day.

When I think of the fact that I have been part of a 35 year committed love relationship, when I think of the joy I experienced on the trail, I  marvel that either of these was possible for a person who suffered so much from depression and from psychosomatically amplified ailments, whose characterological inclination was to blame others, and to run away when life got tough. I give most of the credit for my good fortune to my analysis with Professor Freud. Of course the Freud I worked with was "my Freud," not an actual spirit presence, however vivid and "other" he seemed to me. Nevertheless, "my Freud" was informed by the historical Freud, by his writings, and most of all by Chris's lectures.

So I write this blog, just as I also work at writing the case history (from the professor's point of view) of our analysis, out of gratitude and curiosity. If I can, I want in some small way to pass the blessing on. I also want to understand how it became possible for me of all people to become part of a lasting love relationship and to hike the Pacific Crest Trail, the Arizona Trail, and the northern part of Oregon Coast Trail (until the pads on the soles of my feet wore out).

But most of all I want to say thank you. Thank you to Professor Freud, to Chris Downing, to all whom I have loved and been loved by, to all with whom I have shared a moment of connection. And a very special "thank you" to you, who are reading this post, and willing to make the journey with me.

When I read over what I have written, I am keenly aware that I have not yet found the playful, reflective, authentic voice that has emerged at times in these blogs in the past. I am aware that when I blogged the tour to Sicily last spring, I was looking forward to a solitary hike of the last section of the Arizona Trail right after the group tour. I have no such hike to look forward to now. I am definitely grieving the trail, and along with it the self-state and voice that were gifts of the trail. I am also of course still learning to live with my niece's death, dealing with physical difficulties that interfere even with day hikes some days, and beginning at last to deal with the losses incurred by my retirement.

It is important to me to attempt this blog, even knowing that I may not discover a voice that will make it a joy to write and a joy to read. I may be trudging through this blog, forcing myself, suspecting that only the most loyal (and stubborn?) of readers will be able to stay with it.

But even if the blog is not all that I might wish it to be, it is important to me to attempt it. Thank you for your support and for walking with me, not only through Freud's world, but also through my grief.