Carry On

Notes from the Himalayas: Part 2

When we are forced to heal in a world that keeps asking to be lived in who wouldn’t suggest a walk, a run or maybe a twelve-day hike into the heart of the Himalayas?

I wasn’t even really sure what it meant to be “healed” but I was definitely trying to figure it out.

A month spent punching and kicking the shit out of weighted bags and big men at a Muay Thai camp in Thailand - check. I sat meditating for twelve days in complete silence - check. An Ayurvedic gut cleanse that included not one, not two, but three different types of enemas, just to be sure the toxins that were limiting my physical healing journey would be freed from my intestinal tract forever - check.

And then to tie it all together, I was certain that a spring spent hiking through the mountains in a country where Buddha himself is said to have been born, would surely lead me on my own personal path to enlightenment.

The personal part of this path, however, was interrupted when an afternoon spent scrolling, as I hid in my air-conditioned apartment, during the peak of the day’s classic Indian heatwave, left me feeling completely depressed.

It’s hard to explain the feeling of emotions that move through the body, as we use our thumbs, once our most prominent evolutionary asset, to flick through various social media platforms without intention or attention; but when an image or video does affect the heart space and then another within a split second, I experience a sense of helplessness. A numbness that makes me feel as far away from the people in pain, whom I love, as possible. Like the distance it would take to understand traveling into my phone to help them.

I just wanted something heavy to hold onto. Something real, that was not my stupid phone.

I began delusionally daydreaming about reincarnation and thought about that montage of cinematic brilliance in “Everything Everywhere All at Once.” We see the mom and daughter move through the many lifetimes they have lived together in different forms. And then suddenly there they are, no longer people, at the edge of a cliff, taking on the shape of boulders; just two big, ancient rocks in stillness together. Solidified in the structure, mother and daughter, always together.

There was something about the conjuring of this image that lodged itself deep into my chest. The idea that love could outlive language and form. That companionship could exist even in stillness, even in rocks.

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I realized I couldn’t hug the people I saw grieving on Instagram but what if I offered to pick up rocks as a physical representation of their grief or pain and bring them into the heart of the Himalayas, to rest there.

Not because I believed the mountains would erase their pain, but because I knew that they were big enough to hold it.

Older than grief. Wider than heartbreak.

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I was headed to the Manaslu Circuit; a place I can now say with complete confidence is the axis where the earth begins to remember its own enormity. It rises from the northern folds of Nepal, near the Tibetan border, in a region where mountains and prayer have lived beside one another for centuries.

The perfect place for healing.

I put the offer out a week before my hike and many, many friends reached out to say, “Yes, please do that, thank you.”

And so, on the trail, I searched. Each rock manifesting as a reminder of a person lost, a piece of a broken heart, or an ache.

If the presence of this lost love, family member or friend once existed in phone calls, touch, laughter, shared meals, it now lives somewhere less explainable. And somehow, the higher I climbed into the mountains, the closer they felt.

Like the veil between heaven and earth was lifted as the meters climbed brought me closer to my imagination of heaven. Suddenly it was not an imagination, and the once felt energy of these loved ones wrapped their way so intensely around me; it became as clear as the air was fresh. At the 5200meter mark just as we were about to reach the Larke Pass, each breath began to deepen. It had been torrentially raining the evening before and in anticipation of the hardest day of the trail I was nervous falling asleep. But we had awoken to a starlit 4am sky and now just 3 hours later as we were making our way through the snowy trail, the sunrise not yet over the first peak of the day was painting the sky a preemptive lavender.

I think the presence that is experienced only while hiking creates an acute understanding of the connectedness between our bodies and the natural world. A knowing that we are all here together, all of the time, even in death.

And in that understanding, I see that loss is just a feeling.

I was striding at a steady pace, and my lengthening breaths were starting to feel vibrational. I was soothing my soul in complete presence.

I climbed up a snowy ledge, to get above the trail and gently laid out the each of the rocks and left them just in time for the morning sun to come and greet them.

And then I had to find the biggest one I could for my old friend Niko.

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Niko was my childhood best friend, Ana’s, twin flame. Ana and Niko were inseparable. Each with a childlike wonder that led to an adulthood spent chasing adrenaline and peaks around the world that made them feel more alive than the last. They were unapologetically loud; each one’s laughter chasing the other’s, passing through the walls of the rooms they occupied.

They fought like siblings and loved each other like a very old married couple. Anyone who knew them understood their friendship was sacred.

Niko was also an addict. A part of his story that makes the most sense to me.

He was a seeker.

The older I get, the more I understand addiction is seeking with nowhere to land.

We are all reaching for something: our phones, achievement, attention, substances, love. Anything that might quiet the ache of being human for a moment.

I know that in order to feel the most landed into my humanness and connection to this land, I go to the mountains and so did he. It was Nepal where him and Ana visited the basecamp of Mount Everest almost ten years to the day.

I think in all their efforts, Niko and Ana got above a lot of the shit of life.

If this life is a path of learning to love deeper, in the face of loss you choose, you so actively choose, to activate the organ of your heart. To put your hands over it to rock it to safety and to seek out places that bring feelings of peace. To grant yourself permission to heal.

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In the early days after Niko’s death, my healing looked like writing, so I wrote.

If I look at the time and it reads 4:37pm, does it have to be that late? I don’t want it to be that late in the today-ness of today. I don’t want the sun to leave, but it does. There it goes behind big grey puffs and layers of mountains. And it’s gone now and I don’t know, none of us do, if we’ll ever see it again. And it makes me want to scream this question to the little angels sat on their puffs, with their harps and their perfectly manicured wings; why, when one of us dies do we say we’ve lost them?

We haven’t misplaced them.

They are gone.

I really don’t think we should say they’re lost.

Especially when so many people feel lost while they’re here.

What if death, to them, is being found?

Then of course they’re never coming back.

But what if my friend Niko does.

What if he comes back as a little cat that Ana’s great granddaughter meets on a walk around her neighborhood and loves so much that she sits down on the pavement in the heat of a summer’s day in the year 2097. And the two of them lock eyes, the cat purrs and she says “Aw,” and looks up at her mom, Ana’s granddaughter and says “Mom, Mom, Mom, oh Mom. I love this cat so much.”

A love that’s been known before in a lineage that crossed continents and summited mountains and danced and laughed and purred and awed.

But this little girl is only three and she can’t really find the words to encompass all of that knowing. And Niko’s soul is trapped in the warm purring of this cat; all of his love reverberates through the vibration of the pavement making its way through a ground his human feet used to grace.

And in this story Ana’s now one-hundred-and-three the age her own Grandmother lived to be. She’s lived a life without Niko beside her in the moments they were supposed to experience together.

But in her loss, she lived a life in momentum. A deep sense of purpose to experience it all doubly for him.

Each day, as a day of grace for her aliveness.

I just wish that Everest could have been the only real thing he was seeking.

I want the gravity of this life to keep us all tethered. I want us to get off our phones and feel everything everywhere all at once.

And when we do all eventually go somewhere else, I hope the others will carry on.

Because of course, we will meet again. In a place where the today-ness of today comes to an end. The light of our soul’s beam open in the greeting of another day there and we’ll all put our hands to our hearts and say, “Thank You God, another day, I can’t wait for it to start.”