Yosemite...

I will get back to the fucked up dating terminology in a minute...Today I want to talk about the majesty that is Yosemite.

I came up for the weekend to see my friends, Jodi and Phil.  Jodi moved up here a little while ago, opting for the mountain life, giving up the So Cal craziness for peace and serenity.  Phil is visiting from New Zealand and was a lovely host to me when I was in Auckland.  They are good, loving, stable, thoughtful, happy people.  People who have done a great deal of work on themselves and that makes them infinitely fun to be around.

Yesterday we went into Yosemite for the afternoon.  And I forgot how much that place speaks to me.  I know that I am not the only one, I believe Half Dome sits like some sort of beacon for people who are vibrationally pulled towards it.  It is like a giant stone magnet that beckons and calls from deep within its stony silence.

The snow melt almost complete, has filled the river to a raging torrent in most places.  Lots of white water everywhere.  And don’t even get me started on the waterfalls.  They too are beckoning in their own way.  Pulling you closer to baptize you in their icy spray.  The initial dousing frigid, but then later, once the sun hits your skin, invigorating, likely similar to the feeling, post cold plunge, all the crazy people who do such things talk about.

I guess what I felt and feel when here is beauty.  Just eye popping, death defying majesty in every vista.  It is overwhelming.  It causes me to feel a part of and very small at the same time.  Like I am part of all that amazing gorgeousness but also stand alone, a ways back, because admiration is my part in this relationship.  I can participate but I can only get so far into it because the relationship between us and Yosemite shall always require a silent reverence that reverberates deep within us. Pulling us towards source and wonder.  And we are always the one that makes out better in the deal.

When I am here, I wonder why I stay away so long.  I find myself tractor beamed to this place and then stand transfixed as I marvel at God’s majesty everywhere.

As always, I think about moving.  I think about allowing myself to be beckoned to this place but I know the timing isn’t right.  Or perhaps, maybe it never will be for me.  I am coming into some acceptance in my life.  About my life.  And how my life is currently.  I am forever talking about moving away.  Forever talking about relocating to some remote mountain hideaway.  But that is not possible right now in my life...I mean, it is, but it isn’t because I am not willing to abandon the people I love most in this world.  I am needed where I am.  And that has finally become a good feeling instead of something I am trying to run away from.  Other people’s need of me has always instilled panic.  But there is something magical too about Ojai that has allowed me to remain transfixed and rooted.  My tumbleweed ways, cowed and converted into a staying power I didn’t know I possessed.

Makes me think of Half Dome...all the eons it has stood a silent sentinel in the valley.  Watching, waiting, bearing witness to the countless years of changing weather, flora, fauna and us.  Half Dome, unlike us, never dies.  It doesn’t wax or wane or come and go.  Its sole purpose in this life is to be here, now...forever.

I kind of needed that reminder in my life.  Some sort of stony sentry intent of guarding life’s purpose and intimacy, providing a location to return to year after year, to remind us that perhaps it isn’t about moving or leaving or changing.  Perhaps, there are great lessons to be learned in just remaining.  To accepting our fate and finding new ways to love it, cherish it and respect it.

I have always been a cutter and a runner. Never staying in one place long enough to really know it or myself.  But Ojai captured my heart and while it, unlike Half Dome, changes in the passing years, it still speaks to me with a majesty of its own.  I have never really had a hometown.  A place that felt like it knew me, and I it.  I have had a lot of temporary shelters, respites that allowed for a certain amount of growth and comfort but no place that has ever pulled me in and held me in place for very long.

Yosemite reminded me yesterday of the growth in choosing to remain.  To stay.  To hold.  To pause when all the atoms in your being heat up and roil to a boil.  To just turn down the heat a little and sink deeper into the place you dwell, be that your body, your breath, your home or Yosemite.

What I think I am learning is travel does help me to access parts of me that lie dormant or untouched while I am home.  But that doesn’t have to be the only way I find a portal to parts of me I do not know.  I can take the lesson I receive from Half Dome and apply it to my life right there smack dab in the middle of the life I am currently living in the place that has felt more like a home than any place else I have ever lived.

Sometimes life’s lessons are to grow and change and move about.  And sometimes, perhaps, life’s lesson is to just stay where you are and trust that when the winds of change blow in with the intent to move you onward, they will come. And if they don’t, perhaps your lot in this life is just to visit the places that beckon you and then return home to allow those very same lessons to bury themselves deeper into your soul.  I know I am a person that takes a while to really assimilate something, something I may “know” takes a very long time to work its way from what I “know” to what I “feel.”  The distance between my head and heart is only about a foot, but in emotional miles those two locales are often journeys apart. And the effort expended to get from one to the other, heroic.

So I return to Yosemite to be reminded once more...

Again...still.