I wrote a long time ago about my invention of a new therapy called Cryking. It is simple really: take your pain, heartbreak, neurosis, agony get on a dirt trail and go. The tears, in my experience, come all by themselves. Although sometimes sad songs really help get them going. But flow they will...healing water from the soul, spilling onto the dusty ground alchemizing the earth, water, sky and soul into a unified moment in time.
Seems to me that my lot in life is to walk with pain. Literally, my hips hurt and every step sometimes hurts. But walking, hiking to be specific, is the only thing that brings relief to the gut wrenching pain in the belly of my soul.
I walk off old mes and old yous. (Thanks for the visual Maggie Rogers). And I discover a new way to be, a new being inside myself. And the tears that drop with each footfall are all part of the process. Hiking without crying is just not the same for me. The thing that happens in my heart and mind does not touch the spirit inside without the crying. Like the pain needs to literally leak out of me.
So yesterday I cryked again. Surely not the first time since I last wrote about it. But last time all of my cryking was about a love lost. Heartbreak in every step on every mile. And I walked a fuck ton of miles. Shedding pain on the beautiful landscape. The natural world didn’t seem to mind. I know, I asked. It welcomed the carnage and raggedness of my soul.
Nature seemed to say, “this is nothing sweet girl, we have weathered firestorms, droughts, bitter cold and blazing heat - your tears and pain are welcome here - we can handle it and help you transform that which you think might kill you, into a healing that allows you to move forward...even as you know not where your steps might lead. Come to us, let the flowers, dry creek beds, trees, poison oak, bushes, mountain sides, and open sky hold you in good stead as you pass through your inner hell. Bring it to us, we know what to do with it, really, we have been weathering these kinds of things since time began.”
I hear that every single time my feet hit the trail. I walk and open further than I thought possible before.
I came upon a arete yesterday and as I crested the ridgeline, I just wept. I am not sure what it was about that moment, that place in time but something about reaching the summit liquified my internal metal and I dissolved. Surrounded by nothing but the quiet serene I always find in nature, I just let the tears come. I wept and grieved and allowed myself to fall apart.
It is such a privilege to cryke. Really. There aren’t many places on this earth that I can fall apart. Very few, if any, I can let in that far. There was one once upon a time but his departure was what led me to cryke in the first place. After he left, all that I had was nature, the whole wide world that exists for me on the trail. I know that there are many others that are willing to help me shoulder pain but for the most part that remains undoable for me. I cannot lean on those shoulders and I don’t even know why. It isn’t them, it is me. Pain and solitude having long been joined in me. I can talk with others but I cry alone.
This time the cryke was for my son. I walked off an old me and an old him. I said prayers for each of us to find a new us that is better than what we both bring to the table now. That we move forward in our individual lives so that we may each find a path back to the other.
Cryking is what gets me there. Cryking allows entrance into the heart I want to shudder and close. Cryking floods the doorway to my heart and clears it to unblock my inherent desire for closure.
In the wilds of my heart and the physical presence on the trail, I cryke to memorialize all that I love and all that I have to leave behind. I move and the earth moves with me. I am brought to tears so that I can move with and through the pain. It is my process and I am grateful for every single moment I have spent allowing parts of my being to hit the ground in tiny droplets of healing.
There was a time that I could not cry and it still doesn’t come easily for me. Something I did not practice for so long that it remains rusty and in poor repair. I am getting better, I am moving forward on those trails. My interiority becoming one with the landscape. Nature being strong enough to hold my pain and help me find new trails upon which to release it.
Cryking may not be for everyone, but for me, it has been the path to healing. I know what to do with the pain today, I know where to take it and how to bleed it off. I know that me putting miles underneath the heartbreak, gives me a solid foundation to begin to let go, to heal, to love again with some new part of me that previously had been hidden most especially from myself. And I find it all out there on the dusty carvings of our human need, etched into the landscape of the wild. There I find my heart, my soul and a new me who can begin again to love an old you.
