It is unsettling and unnerving to realize you have everything you want, or at least easy access to it … and so little of what you need.  Hmmmm.    What DO I need?

Is there a more relevant and urgent question?

Of course, the answer to “what do I need?” is different for everyone.   But even getting glimpses of what it is can be elusive.  Too often we get caught up in ephemeral nonsense, and just miss it … or more common perhaps, fail to even give it any consideration at all.  Sometimes we trip over it and fail to recognize it.  Complicating things of course is that it also evolves throughout our lives.

Now true enough, for some, what they “need” remains at least somewhat stable.  While for others it’s marked by big shifts through the years.  Yet all meaning and purpose lives therein.

The adventure, the quest to identify and embrace those needs and the meaning that they ought to bring … well, that IS the journey.  And yes, truly, the journey IS the destination.  That sounds trite and trivial.  But the shock… the sudden realization … the transformation … the Zen moment of satori … that comes when we understand and integrate “journey” and “meaning” is one of those inflection points where lives change.  Isn’t it?

That understanding is a weird combination of compass and barometer and rheostat.  At once pointing the way …. instilling urgency and intention to embrace what is … as surely as we also embrace what is to come.

However, maybe more so now than at any other time in human history we live ever just a whisper away from losing perspective on the difference between what we want and what we need.  In part because having what you WANT (as opposed to what you need) can bring comfort for a time, satisfaction for a time, even a sense of fulfillment for a time.  But not really.   We get dulled to what is important.

Thomas Merton said, “The greatest need of our time is to clean out the enormous mass of mental and emotional rubbish that clutters our minds ….  Without this housecleaning we cannot begin to see. Unless we can see, we cannot think.”

Merton was surely on to something.   The world we live in excels at the generation of the rubbish and clutter of which he spoke.  But the housecleaning does NOT require permanent monasticism.  But I believe it does require retreat.  Or rather, I’ll just posit that retreat is a dandy facilitator.

While in some ways I am no closer at 63 than I was at 18 to succinctly articulating my needs, I sense that I am closest to whatever that is when I am in the mountains.  Unfortunately, the opposite is also true.  Too long away from the centeredness I feel there is a sure prescription for malaise.

I know with the sureness that comes with decades that when I hear wind in the trees of the woods, the musky smell of simultaneous new growth and abundant decay, and hear the gurgling sound of water rippling over rocks, I am filled with wonder and contentment.  And peace.   When I see the mist rising in the morning over the trees, the sun beginning to burn through, all is right in my soul.

That I so seldom experience these things leaves me unbalanced and of out-of-step with myself.

I do not believe there is magic involved. Nor is there an “answer” waiting to be found if only we look deep enough and exercise enough rigor in our analysis of things found in wild and remote places.   It’s just that when you are there, you are a part of “what is”.

A part of what is. The illusion of separateness fades.  If we are very lucky indeed, and with practice, it sometimes even disappears.

Sun shines, rivers run, and there is a symphony of light and shadow and sound and aromas that can, if we let it, carry us forward not as navigators but passengers …. no… as participants …. first this way and then that, towards the inevitability of both the journey itself, AND the present moment in all its ordinariness and grandeur.

The dance of what is, is now.  And there is only the dance.

Harry Middleton says in his extraordinary book, On the Spine of Time: An Angler’s Love of the Smokies:  “Human beings come equipped with something called vestibular sensors, which are located in the inner ear.  They give us balance, keep us level, if not level-headed.  Mountains are vestibular sensors on a grander scale, absorbing the world about them, struggling for balance.”

I need to get out.  I need to tramp through the wild places.  I need to let them carry me on to wherever it is that I am headed.

I am headed home.

love,
John