{"id":342,"date":"2011-04-15T15:17:59","date_gmt":"2011-04-15T22:17:59","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.ecopsychology.org\/gatherings\/?p=342"},"modified":"2011-10-14T12:51:50","modified_gmt":"2011-10-14T19:51:50","slug":"finding-galleons-lap","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.ecopsychology.org\/gatherings\/finding-galleons-lap\/","title":{"rendered":"Finding Galleon’s Lap"},"content":{"rendered":"

by John Wickham<\/em><\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

As a child I was perplexed why mountain climbers would return empty-handed.\u00a0 They always ascended as if hunting for something lost or left behind.\u00a0 Then venturing up with my parents to Camels Hump in Vermont, I too looked around.\u00a0 But the journey down lasted 30 years until I climbed back for\u00a0 the meaning of the summit.<\/p>\n

Still a youth, my descent from the mountain began with a emotional detour.\u00a0 I weathered internal, opposing forces.\u00a0 While discovering the passion of the guitar and composing, I was playing war with friends as soldier-boys.\u00a0 As a young adult I pursued both vocations, music and the Army.\u00a0 But lurking in the underworld were the disharmony and battles for my soul.\u00a0 Psychic-combat left no victors, only a downward trail into fog and darkness.<\/p>\n

My last Army duty was at Fort Carson, Colorado.\u00a0 The Post sits like an armpit wedged between the Great Plains and the jutting Rocky Mountains.\u00a0 Fierce lightning storms would often park there in the Summer.\u00a0 It was then I felt a magnetic tug upwards to misty peaks that seemed to pierce through into sunlight.<\/p>\n

After the Army and a law degree in my pocket, I stopped to legally heal fellow veterans.\u00a0 And yet the soul lured me back to the forested Colorado peaks to write its ethereal music.\u00a0 Turning in the cusp of my journey, I asked whether the mountains could uplift the spirit to heal the split.<\/p>\n

In the past, traditional prescriptions of culture and religion left me like gnarled driftwood.\u00a0 I scanned the myriad colors of the rainbow for answers for that peak, unifying experience\u2014from the vision quest of Lakota holy man Black Elk, or a latter-day Moses with an ear to burning sagebrushes, or the meditative walking of Zen’s Kinhin, or even the Taoist’s sauntering to calm the mind’s noise.<\/p>\n

I left no modern stone unturned.\u00a0 I explored the Romantic\u2019s sublime tensions, then to England\u2019s nature mystic, Richard Jefferies.\u00a0 I agreed when Jefferies wrote \u2014 \u201cthere is yet something to be found….more subtle than electricity…[but] it must be dragged forth by might of thought.\u201d\u00a0 But America\u2019s nature mystic, Henry Thoreau, made a grueling ascent up a terrifying Mt. Ktaadn.\u00a0 He left feeling scolded by the peak, as if it was an \u201cinsult to the gods to climb and pry into their secrets, and try their effect on humanity.\u201d<\/p>\n

I trailed other Naturalists who led to the hopeful science of biophilia that asks to restore a healthy emotional attachment to wildness.\u00a0 I pawed through eco-psychology to experience an emotional “uprush” from our buried, ancestral “ecological unconscious.”\u00a0\u00a0 I dug into Jungian psychoanalysis to explain the universal power of the mythic mount in all cultures\u2014 the symbolism of leaving below a fragile, cluttered ego to transcend into a higher state\u2014 even for a glimpse\u2014 to reunify with God, godliness, or one’s true Self.\u00a0\u00a0 But it was not until I left by the wayside these dry books and climbed once more, did I awaken into sunlight.<\/p>\n

In the Autumn of 2006 I hiked up Buckeye Gulch Trail near Leadville, Colorado.\u00a0 At first I used the botanist’s eye on the white, poisonous \u201cghost-berries.\u201d\u00a0 I learned that Native American elders once warned children to respect but not eat the shiny twin berries as they were the ancestors of the delicious maroon-red Saskatoon berries.\u00a0 I saw cottony tuffs of willow catkins tossed and carried by the wind.\u00a0 I laughed at Shaggy Ink Cap mushrooms that resembled a crowded party of balding dwarfs.\u00a0 Suddenly I looked down across the trail to tracks of a mountain lion\u2019s forepaws\u2014 claws retracted, with prints the size of my spread-out hand.\u00a0 But the tracks appeared eroded and trailing away after hoof prints of a deer or elk herd.\u00a0 I had pepper spray and air-horn, but felt better picking up a heavy branch to carry, nicknaming it \u2018Neanderthal Club.\u2019<\/p>\n

After an exhausting climb I burst through the tree line to enter a grassy meadow that traversed a ridge.\u00a0 At the same moment the wind ceased leaving such stillness and calm that I could hear my pounding heart as it syncopated with every step forward.\u00a0 After ten or so minutes into the meadow I was oddly prompted to glance down at my Neanderthal Club.\u00a0 I noticed it was not my arm nor hand holding the stick\u2014a shiver ran through me.\u00a0 I stopped and turned to gaze at the vista of the surrounding peaks and setting sun.\u00a0 I was overcome with a strange sense of supreme self-confidence.\u00a0 At that moment an unknown force within compelled me to speak out loud “I belong…I should never leave.”\u00a0 Fear dropped away.\u00a0 I raised the club over my head towards the sun and uttered a rapturous yell.\u00a0 No longer was I a stranger to the desolate wilderness, to this alien landscape.\u00a0 I am nature raw, yet keenly aware, filled with an intense focus touching into my roots.\u00a0 No longer was I the 21st century man, a soldier, a lawyer, a music composer.\u00a0 They dissolved away.<\/p>\n

I sat in my meadow as an amber sun descended perfectly between two 14-eener mountain peaks.\u00a0 In a flash the symbolism struck me that Nature\u2019s energy lay in the balancing \u2018middle\u2019 of two opposing titans.\u00a0 Like the composer and the lawyer, wild passion and cold logic, repressed unconscious and the conscious mind, the dying and re-emerging, the Taoist yin and yang?\u00a0\u00a0 I had been trapped in the conventional mind set with a compulsion to grind down conflicting energies and talents into a funnel to spit out an unchanging, fixed Western persona.\u00a0 That trail would leave a misshapen and artificial form\u2014a \u201cvirtual self.\u201d\u00a0 But creation and self-flourishing emerge from an unforced, continual interaction between two forces that follow cycles naturally to accommodate change.\u00a0 They were never battling armies bleeding my soul, but interdependent and complementary.\u00a0 They were never encouraged to flow and ebb into each other like a swinging pendulum.\u00a0 To awaken is to nurture an utter openness to a path avoiding extremes, like the setting sun returning to its middle.\u00a0 That\u2019s the place \u201cI belong\u201d and endeavor not to leave.<\/p>\n

As I retraced my meadow trail, I recalled Winnie the Pooh stories read to my young twin boys.\u00a0 The series ended with \u201cPooh and friends walking on, thinking of This and That, and by-and-by they came to an enchanted place on the very top of the Forest.\u201d\u00a0 In the center among a circle of trees was a floor not coarse or fouled but grassy, quiet and smooth.\u00a0 Sitting there they could \u201csee the whole world spread out until it reached the sky, and whatever there was all the world over, was with them in that place, Galleons Lap.\u201d<\/p>\n

__________________________________<\/p>\n

John Wickham<\/a> lives in Evergreen Colorado, where he is a civil rights attorney, and occasional film-TV composer in the Western\/Native American genre.
\nSince 1998 his published work has included essays in Indian Country Today and Mountain Gazette (Frisco CO), a feature article in American Indian Quarterly (Winter 2003) and OP-Eds in Denver Post and Rocky Mountain News.\u00a0 His writings explore Western attitudes towards Nature and offer resolution for the resultant ill effects on Self and the environment.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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