I have been following the travels of a young man, (through his online blog), as he walked across the country with his dog Mabel.
His back-story is similar to mine, in that professional success came to me early and left me as disillusioned in my late twenties, as he had become before he began walking. A capable corporate lawyer by his early thirties, he found no value in the supposed success he had achieved, and so he set out one day to walk across the United States. Apparently there are about 18 people a year who share his course of action, even if they don’t share his motivations.
They call themselves “Through Walkers”.
I have so enjoyed his conversations, as he walks. He talks a lot, in his blog, about his dog Mabel. Her commitment to her self-appointed job of keeping him safe during the day, watching over him in three hour shifts as they traded lookout duty – in mountain bear country –at night, how she curled up on his feet in the cooler climes to help keep him warm and snug.
His pithy blogs were a fun read, and it was very clear how much more in touch with himself he was, when Mabel padded out into the Pacific ocean as they reached Dog Beach and the end of his country wide walk. He reports that he broke into tears about every three hours, the first couple of months, when he returned to living in an apartment. And he also reports that Mabel does not enjoy walking on a leash, now, anymore than he enjoys sleeping under a roof.
I suppose in part I began to read his blog because it reminded me of the-walker-of-all-long-distance-walkers. Her name for the last 32 years of her life was Peace Pilgrim. The first forty-four, she had been Mildred Norman Ryder.
It seems like Mabel’s dad, and me, she had found only suffering in the success she too, had acquired… before she began walking across the country until the very last day of her life.
Unlike Mabel’s dad, Tyler, she did not leave her home well provisioned with a tent to sleep in, pots to cook with, an ipad to write on, a small buggy to push her supplies along in front of her, or a loyal and loving companion to ease the emotional difficulties of a “through walk”.
She left her home on the west coast headed toward the Atlantic, wearing a cotton shirt, cotton pants, tennis shoes and an over blouse tunic with the words “Peace Pilgrim – Walking for Peace” emblazoned on the back, that had two pockets sewn into the front. In these two pockets she carried the entire sum of her world’s possessions. A small pencil and school age child’s pencil sharpener, an equally small pad of paper, a comb, and a toothbrush…this was the outer condition of her life until the day it ended on her seventh walk across the country, in her 73rd, year, in an automobile accident. (She had begun accepting rides which would ferry her from wherever she was in her walk, to the speaking engagements that by then were occupying large amounts of her time, and back to the exact spot in the road she had left off on her walk. On this day, one week prior to her 74th birthday, the car she was riding in was engaged in a head on collision and she died instantly.)
I read her book, which is free to anyone who wishes to read it…(and in fact I have it on PDF file, drop me a request and I will send it along to you) and she became one of my spiritual heroes, as I read of her incredible courage.
Unlike Tyler, there were no cell phones by which she could stay in touch with anyone at all. Also, unlike Tyler, her walk was not funded or supplied. She never had provisions with her, but was always supplied and every need met, while on the road…including the sudden snow storm that blew up in Colorado on her fourth walk in August, when she should have been entirely safe to be that far north and instead was suddenly encased in a sheath of blowing snow, so dense she could not see the road in front of her. She reports that a voice sprung up in her, - by now and otherwise - entirely silent mind and told her to continue walking and then “now left, go forward, now right, step up, step over” and so on…until she was lead to a discarded refrigerator carton, in which she found the shelter that saved her life.
She had vowed that she would not eat, unless food was supplied her. By her third walk and beyond… that was no longer an issue as she became quite well known, due to the press coverage of the day, and was routinely asked to speak to college and university groups, churches, and just families out for a drive who spotted her on the roads in their hometowns. But in the first two walks, when she was entirely unknown and entirely without resources, she reports that she never went more than three days without someone noticing her and offering to feed her in some way, or she would stumble across an apple orchard, or a wild berry field.
Can you even begin to imagine the trust that would have taken? Can you comprehend the fearful thoughts that must have plagued her into near madness in those early days?
I can.
I went on a similar journey, in my 28th year. (Only mine was entirely internal.) I left behind a high paying sales job, a Mercedes convertible, a nice condo, and began riding a bike for an entire year. The noise in my head was a cacophony; the fear in my heart was beyond my ability to describe. I had a lovely gay neighbor whose compassion was apparently boundless. When I would awaken from the night terrors that plagued me like a disease, and run to his apartment at 3 in the morning, banging on his door, and begging to be let in. He became so accustomed to my nervous, sweaty, pale, appearance on his doorstep, that he began coming to the door in his underwear alone, open his door, return to his bed and to sleep… all while not really awake. I suppose that first year, I spent more of my sleeping hours on his couch, than I did in my own bed.
Life then forced me into a job I had never wanted, nor had seen myself doing. Through no fault of my own and with no desire to do so, I became a Muralist and later an Interior Designer. I often hated being on that scaffolding. Most people I met, envied my “living my dream” lifestyle, they romantically imagined was mine. For me, the standing on scaffolding listening to the chorus of voices that lived inside of me, and the fears that they routinely dredged up, was often horrendous. I so understand Anne Sophie Swetchine 1782 – 1857, a Russian Mystic who became famous for a Parisian Salon, where the intellectuals and radicals of her day gathered to seek understanding and enlightenment, and where she was reported to have said about the voices that litter our interiors spaces. ~ “Might we not say to the confused voices which sometimes arise from the depths of our being… Ladies, be so kind as to speak only four at a time?”
Life left me alone, standing on scaffolding, and in outer silence for almost fifteen years. But that had not been enough…
Finally unwilling to paint one more mural, I left my business and moved back to Arizona. I didn’t work the first two years I was back here. I cannot say why. Truthfully can’t. But alone again with only my mind to face, I spent more time listening to the chorus of voices…but by this time, they were well behaved enough, to “speak only four at a time”.
Then I went back to work in the design field, stock piled some income for what I thought was going to be my retirement…and instead, the crash of ’08 took my industry into a depression. This time three years went by, and this un-chosen sabbatical was the most severe yet.
There was no kindly gay neighbor. No money to run my car, and no desire to run around town, filling up all those hours with something external to do.
This time…I merely sat, and waited.
The greatest gift my business had given me, despite my emotional struggles with it… Were the enormous reservoirs of trust I had developed and begun to rely upon. My life had never been on the line, guided to a cardboard refrigerator box in a blinding snowstorm, but I had been just as clearly directed as I strove to paint paintings to large to even see, as I applied brushstroke after brushstroke, year after year.
Over the course of this last sabbatical, an experience that first made an appearance on the day my mother drew her last breath, finally became a stable and accessible place within me.
Like Peace Pilgrim, my mind became Silent.
It is the truest thing I have ever experienced, and it swept away my beliefs about life and the living of it… like a good strong breeze will sweep clean a November landscape.
Carl Jung said, “The greatest and most important problems of life cannot be solved or even understood, they can only be outgrown.”
I know that to be true.
To discover yourself inside a silent mind is a wonder. It cannot be adequately described, or expressed. It is as simple as the sun rising, as profound as the breath that breathes us, as clarifying as heat on dew.
It is what Tyler wanted, even if he didn’t know it, when he and Mabel set out on their walk. It is the nearness of it while he walked, and its loss when he returned, that caused him to “cry like a little girl every three hours”. It is the motivation behind Peace beginning her thirty years of walking, and the full realization of it in her self, that caused untold numbers of people to turn toward her message, in the turbulent sixties and seventies.
Having found it in myself, makes every footfall of my journey worth it. All the years that I stood in the face of my internal critics, the “ladies who refused to speak merely four at a time”, and the suffering they caused me…all so very worth it.
The most significant experience of my day-to-day existence now, is that I am never anxious. When I faced a diamond back rattler that had found its way into my dining room, I experienced the fear that is necessary for survival, and it was entirely clear to me the vast difference between that fear and the acidic nature of anxiety, which has gone from my life.
A few days ago, I passed a gall stone in the night. I have never felt a more searing pain. I had no need at all to reach out to someone. I found the most comfortable position I could discover, began watching my breath, and my pain, let my mind go silent…and waited. It took several hours, but there was no mental or emotional resistance to the severity of the pain, or its contents, and thus there was only the simplicity of awaiting its end.
Due to the largesse of an old friend I am recently employed, and under her guidance the company she founded, seeks to serve others and imagines that a large part of that service, is to provide everyone with an equal measure of external emotional comfort, support, and well being.
I have been supervised by a woman whose perfectionism and military background requires of her that she searches for what is wrong in a diligent and commanding way…it has not been pleasant working for her. She finds much of what I do to be inadequate, and each of the layers of management…all the way up to my friend the owner, have wanted me to allow them to “coach” my supervisor out of what she believes in her heart of hearts is “right”. I have resisted their desire fully. It has caused my friend to wonder if she were fulfilling her role as a spiritual leader, because she was “allowing abuse to occur under her roof”.
For myself, I do not see it that way at all…
I have not externally pilgrimaged across our nation, as Peace Pilgrim had done. But I have traveled the entire length, breadth, and depth of my internal landscape. I have stood still and listened to every voice that had ever taken root inside my mind, until they were finally done speaking to me. I have endured my own self-hatred, which once threatened my survival, until there was nothing left of it. I have journeyed with my irrational fears and anxieties, until only primal and quite necessary survival fear, is possible in me.
I have come to see the great wisdom in Peace’s statement when she said about emotional disturbances…”Do not suppress it – that would hurt you inside. Do not express it – this would not only hurt you inside, it would cause ripples in your surroundings. What must be done is that you transform it.”
We live in an age that believes that if you express your fears and anxieties and disturbance with others, that those fears will leave you. Having done that myself – for many years – I can say that it did help me…but it did not free me. Freedom can only be found through transformation. For transformation to occur you must become willing to be a “through walker”. You must be willing to leave all that you believe behind…to turn your back on all that you were taught would save you, and face the demons head on…and entirely alone.
Freedom can only be found in this one way.
Comfort, some measure of emotional stability, a certain form of pleasure, and some types of kindness…can all be had by teaching one another how to speak, how to behave, how to conduct ourselves in a shared enviroment.
That is not what I am willing to settle for.
I have tasted the wonder of a silent mind. To stand still inside yourself and discover you are not the voice of the personality that you label “me”, that you are not the tiny span of time that parenthetically encases your life in this, your current body, that you are not your wants, desires, or demands…is liberation. All else is a mere reflection…
I trust that the impetus that started Tyler and Mabel off and into the western sun will carry him along. I know that Peace found her eternal self. And I have discovered more than I could have ever hoped, wished, or prayed for…even if I had known how…which I did not.
The path of freedom is a singular endeavor; you must travel alone, naked and willing.
I bless my intense and critical supervisor for coming into my life and bringing with her an enhanced capacity for me to watch my internal experience, and not to seek outside myself for release or surcease.
So in the end…I say with my whole heart, soul, and mind…
Walk On and Walk Through.
Adayre R. Miller
2/11/12
You may read more about Tyler at www.tylercoulson.com and more about Peace at www.peacepilgrim.com
