The Mountain-top epiphany

A story from my journey to New Hampshire.

Let me start by giving some context for this story: I grew up in southern NH and my brother got married there the last weekend of September. Afterwards, my boyfriend and I stayed for a few extra days so I could show him around some of my favorite places.

So, we were in New Hampshire during peak leaf season and naturally we had to make time one day to go leaf peeping. This is where today’s story begins, as Zach and I drove up to the White Mountains to catch the fall colors.

We had an interesting day to say the least. At our first stop, we went on a hike that is generally raved about in the White Mountains. I had never done this one myself, so we thought it would be a good experience. We arrived, and discovered it was a paid entrance fee. $21 per person. Pretty steep for a hike, but we decided no problem, let’s do it. It’s supposed to be great.

While it was a beautiful hike, it was crowded and we felt a bit bewildered by why the entrance fee was so high. The color changes were pretty underwhelming, so also not ideal for leaf peeping. When we finished the hike, we chalked it up to a weird lesson learnt, and headed off to our next step.

After driving the Kancamagus highway (THE leaf peeping highway in the White Mountains), we found another hike which promised a great lookout at the top. As we approached this hike, I noticed a rock chip in the windshield of the car we were driving. The last few years have been full of car-related challenges for me, including 3 cracked windshields from rocks on the highways in Colorado, so I immediately felt my anxiety rise. I couldn’t help the thought that wound its way up: why do anxiety-provoking car things seem to always happen in the mountains?

(In the end it turned out that rock chip was already there and we just hadn’t noticed it, so all’s well and ended well, but it served the purpose of bringing up anxiety this day).

When we found the hike, we had a bit of a clunky experience actually getting parked and on the way. But finally, off we went!

If you’ve never hiked in the White Mountains, let me set the scene for you. New Hampshire’s state motto is “Live Free or Die” and we take that seriously. In the mountains, this means that our trails are steep, poorly marked, and often require clambering up rocks and boulders. I’ve hiked a lot in Colorado and New Hampshire and while Colorado’s mountains are obviously higher altitude, I think that New Hampshire’s hikes can be more difficult because of the way the trails are made (not in comparison to a 14er of course but to more average hikes).

So we started our hike. Almost immediately the hike turned into clambering up boulders as we ascended quickly. As we climbed, my anxiety was still simmering. Why do I seem to get more anxious in the mountains now? I kept wondering. Is there even a correlation with being in the mountains right now or am I letting past fears take up too much space in my mind? We’d spent the day before on the seaside in Maine and my stress levels had plummeted. Now in the mountains, they were rising again. I’d been so excited for this mountain day, so why weren’t the mountains cooperating with my excitement?

About halfway up the mountain, I turned to Zach and I said, “This sucks.” His response: “Hiking? Yeah, it kind of does.”

“Yes!” I told him. “I’m so sick of everything being so damn hard all the time. This is hard, that is hard, climbing up this damn mountain is hard, why are we doing this? Why are we doing this for fun?”

He looked at me calmly. “That’s why I had stopped hiking before I met you,” he said.

This is true. When we met he told me he didn’t like to hike much anymore. He’d hiked non-stop during difficult, depressed eras of his life and in his healthier state of mind he found himself uninterested in climbing mountains for fun. But I was still in my hiking phase so he started hiking again with me.

Back to this hike though. We continued up the mountain, venting our frustrations and anxieties the whole way up. So much anger and anxiety was flowing through me, unstuck from wherever it had been hiding in my fascia and nervous system. I allowed myself to give voice to it all, letting the trees, rocks and mountain bear witness. Zach was letting his frustration free as well.

In this way we reached the top and the view was, predictably, beautiful. See below:

And yet, I still found myself mostly incensed.

“I have loved mountains my whole life,” I told Zach. “I always dreamt of living in the mountains. And the mountains did help me heal years ago, that I'm grateful for. But holy crap have the mountains also brought up the hardest shit in my life. And yet I still seek them out. I’ve missed the mountains up until this moment. But now I’m hearing a message I think the mountains have been trying to tell me for a long time: you can choose an easier path.”

It was like being in a wide awake-state shamanic journey. A moment of profound awareness. The mountains had been trying to share this message with me and I was finally ready to listen. I can choose an easier path.

Before I continue: Many people love the mountains and find ease, simplicity, and continual healing from them. I respect that deeply. For me though, this was a moment of incredible clarity and epiphany. I spent most of my 20s in the mountains, or trying to get to the mountains. The White Mountains were teachers for me in my Lyme journey, the Rocky Mountains helped me integrate my shamanic path, and the Swiss Alps were my safe place, the first place I truly embodied my health post Lyme. The mountains have been great teachers. I have run to the mountains to hike away my pain, sat and cried on mountaintops, laid beneath the sun at high altitudes and received light codes into my skin. I have meditated, journeyed and learned from the spirits of the mountains. I have lived in the mountains, vacationed to new mountains and challenged myself and my body by climbing them.

Climbing a mountain is hard work. It’s arduous, it’s sweaty, it hurts. Living in the mountains is also hard work. The weather is unpredictable, the driving is more technical, there are less amenities, and the terrain is overall harsher. Of course, there can be great rewards to living in the mountains: first and foremost being that it’s beautiful.

The mountains became a mirror for the part of me that felt addicted to challenges. I used to find the hardest hikes I could and go do them for “fun”. The challenge was intoxicating. I found myself unconsciously choosing the harder path, pretty much always. This is a habit I’ve been unwinding over the last few months.

As we sat at the top of this mountain, I listened and heard the message. It’s time to choose an easier path. It’s time to listen to the mountains and everything they’re bringing up: the anxiety, the clunkiness, the challenges. These things exist in life, but we don’t have to chase them.

I realized: I no longer need to climb a mountain in an attempt to create more difficulty on my terms before life can do it for me.

Sitting on top of the mountain, I thought about the previous day at the beach. The calm and peace of the ocean. The rhythmic sound of the waves. I felt the most peace on that beach that I had experienced in an immeasurably long time. For months the ocean has been a fixture in my shamanic journey spaces, like a call. As I breathed into my womb, I felt the difference in my body between holding the mountains within (heavy, challenging, beautiful but weighty) and holding the ocean within (flow, strength, the water of life).
Then, I thought about the elements of the mountains: earth and fire. Earth, clay, rocks: they’re all elemental reflections of the body, the bones, the passed down lineage line that we each carry in our DNA. Fire keeps us warm, lights the path forward, burns away anything that gets in its way.
In contrast, consider the elements of the ocean: water, air. Water reflects our blood, the flow of the womb, the pulse of creation. Air fills our lungs carrying information and life.

Elementally, the mountains invite us to heal our lineage, to burn away our karma, to discover what weighs us down and free ourselves from it. Perhaps this is why the mountains are dry and prone to burning: purification and cleansing.
The ocean invites us into the womb, to be cradled by her lifeblood. To breathe her life force, to create, to flow, to be washed clean. Perhaps this is why the ocean is prone to storms like cyclones and hurricanes that can bring flooding, like a water cleansing.

These musings brought me back to the message: choose an easier path. The mountains were clear: it was time to break the tie. Time to release the hold they had on me and the emotional attachment I had to the challenges they contain.

On the top of that mountain, I yelled out my release. I made peace with the mountains and all the challenges they have reflected to me, as guides on my journey.

When the mountains and I were complete, Zach and I headed back down the trail.

We left behind the attachment to hardship and frustration. To challenges and difficulty. As we descended, we stopped a few times to shake more of those threads off ourselves. We laughed and promised to not hike a mountain for a long time, to let the message of ease settle and anchor within.

And the next day, we went to the ocean. We allowed the Atlantic to cleanse us, dipping our whole bodies, heads and faces in, allowing her waters to rejuvenate us.

Choosing a new path.

Ease.

Simplicity.

No longer searching for challenges.

Perhaps we are ocean people now.