May 20-21. Walla Crag and Castlerigg Stone Circle

Monday and Tuesday, May 20-21. Walk to Walla Crag (elev. 376 meters) with side trips (10 miles) Monday. Tuesday walk to Castlerigg Stone Circle, circling back along lake (9 miles). 

Dear Trail Friends, 

Monday Chris and I hiked up to Walla Crag, a beautiful varied footpath with gorgeous views (photo 1). 

Judy decided to wander around town and in the course of her wandering she visited the Derwent Pencil Museum. She had previously noticed that the pencils she uses for drawing were called Derwent, and we all were intrigued by the coincidence. Judy bought a whole new larger set of pencils at the museum shop. Photo 2 shows her with her pencils (new and old) and photo 3 is her Monday drawing (inspired by watching mother geese with goslings on the river on the walk home from town.)

We continue to love the walk to town. My drawing Monday was inspired by the colors of blooming azaleas (photo 4). 

Since I don’t have the artistic skill to render the flowers realistically I just made areas of color. (Photo 5). As I drew, I imagined the areas as gold, orange, red and magenta mountains and found myself charmed by the thought. I love flowers and I love mountains - but flowers I associate with transience and fragility, mountains with stillness and strength. So to mix up the two and explore the feelings I had while drawing was fun. It also brought back a memory from my 20s when I took drawing lessons and my teacher once took me to visit an art museum on Harvard campus. I had difficulty relating to the modern art and even felt anxious looking at it. I remember (and I recall blogging about this before - maybe I’m the Southern California desert when I saw pink boulders and somewhat pink mountains?) looking at. De Kooning painting I found especially confusing. She insisted I stay and look at it. It rearranged itself before my eyes, the flat modern painting opening up into a fantasy spaciousness and strokes of pink paint becoming a mountain.  Somehow that experience of facing the unknown became involved with my fears and desires at that time, when I decided to leave my lover David in order to explore my longings to be with women. I thought of that “trail” into the world of sane sex desire as climbing the pink mountain. That mountain represented for me the breast, the cultural stereotypes of feminity and motherhood and nurturance, the biological reality of being female, my intense desire and fear around becoming a mother and passing on life. 

I may have mentioned that we had some intimate conversation at our table at the closing dinner at the Freud Museum. Others spoke of a love affair and broken trust, of the death of a beloved partner, of the impact of mourning and loss. I found myself telling the story of my ambivalent longing to have a child. It was I think the first time I have told the story as a single narrative and the attentive listening and holding of my table mates was an incredible gift. As I think of it now, I think that climbing that pink mountain - my own longings and fears about mothering and giving life, my heartbreak at separation from my mother as a child, my clumsy attempts to give my younger sister Judy what my mother could not give us, my refusal of feminine role as oppression and of motherhood as being people into a violent and unjust and overcrowded world, my embracing the feminine when I became a lesbian (painting my bedroom pink) and wanting to become a mother, meeting Chris and trying to become pregnant and facing infertility, Judy adopting Josie Angel and my trying so hard (and with such limited success) to be supportive of Judy and a kind of backup parent to Josie, and Josie’s tragically premature death and not being able to protect Josie from addiction or Judy from her loss. All of that is in a way the big trail of my life - the climb up Pink Mountain. Maybe learning to make some kind of peace with those longings and fears, those failures (and also the small triumphs hidden among them) is the defining project of my life right now - I do see this stage of life as about learning to love my life as it is, to bless it, to both hold it complete and accept it incomplete, to reconcile myself to death and disappointment, to fully take in the preciousness of being alive, and experiencing beauty and love. 

Today’s walk took us to Castlerigg stone circle. I wish in retrospect that I could have meditated quietly there and made contact with the place. The presence of other people made it hard for me to settle in. I’m grateful that I decided to draw one of the stones. As I drew I had the experience I sometimes have that trees and rocks are -  how to express this? - presences, souls, beings I can engage with. I sometimes feel a deep connection when I lean against or touch a tree or a rock. As I tried to draw the rock from the circle I felt that kind of vital presence, like an old wise soul. I wonder if rocks and trees were sacred (and in some sense divine) to the people who built the stone circle. Some say these stone circles marked the solstices and other astronomical events - I can easily imagine sun and moon and stars, and the circle of the day and the year, being sacred and divine. Especially to human beings living so much closer to the earth, so much more in touch with - at the mercy of and blessed by - the circle of day and night, and of the year.  Photo 6 is the Castlerigg circle of stones and photo 7 is my drawing, “Old Rock Resting.”

I have been loving the flowers and baby animals around us on our walks (speaking of the divine in the circle of seasons). Photo 8 is a collage of flowers and photo 9 is Judy’s drawing of a flower. 

Judy is experimenting with new pencil colors and new ways to blend colors since visiting the museum store. I can feel the newness of spring and if creativity when I look at that flower and I feel very grateful that Judy is finding ways to live with the loss of Josie Angel. As I write that, the line “it could have been otherwise” comes into my mind, and so this poem too. 

Otherwise

I got out of bed
on two strong legs.
It might have been
otherwise. I ate
cereal, sweet
milk, ripe, flawless
peach. It might
have been otherwise.
I took the dog uphill
to the birch wood.
All morning I did
the work I love.

At noon I lay down
with my mate. It might
have been otherwise.
We ate dinner together
at a table with silver
candlesticks. It might
have been otherwise.
I slept in a bed
in a room with paintings
on the walls, and
planned another day
just like this day.
But one day, I know,
it will be otherwise.

—Jane Kenyon

That’s it, isn’t it? To accept death while cherishing life. To accept, perhaps, one’s personal imperfections as a giver/nurturer of life while celebrating what one can give  (however modest, however small - like moving a camera close to focus on the beauty of a small flower)

Photo 10 is a collage of baby animals (and their “mums” as the English would say). 

And photo 11 is a collage of pictures I liked from today’s hike and couldn’t bear not to include. 

 This place is beautiful and different from any other beauty I’ve walked through. I like thinking about Wordsworth and Coleridge living here and how much this beauty is part of the reverence for nature in romantic poetry. I’m curious how much it in turn influenced Thoreau and Walden Pond, and the whole American sense of the natural world as sacred, which in turn influenced our national parks and protected wilderness areas and made possible trails like the Pacific Crest Trail and the Arizona Trail and my hikes on them and these blogs. 

I like the idea of seeing the whole enigma of motherhood as a trail in my life, a mountain for me to climb, and also of seeing my whole love of wilderness trails as part of a larger human trail through time and culture. 

Thank you for sharing this with me. Tomorrow we may visit the pencil museum, and we may go for an English afternoon tea somewhere. We may go to Gramercy to the house where Wordsworth lived. Who knows where we will go and what we will see?

I hope to see you tomorrow on our trail, wherever it may lead.