Drawing from Nature’s Steadfast Spirit to Heal
By Katie Arnold, creator of Brief Flashings in the Phenomenal World: Zen and the Art of Running Free
I’ve all the time been happiest exterior. The kid of an advanced divorce, I sought freedom and solace in my yard and, as I grew, within the concentric circles of wildness that continued to develop round me. In my teenagers, I rode my bike and ran round my neighborhood. My father took us on kayaking and bicycling journeys, the place we camped in a single day in pup tents and ate baked beans and scorching canine over a camp range. In my 20s I found backpacking and whitewater kayaking and path working.
Motion by nature was not simply how I moved my physique, it was how I moved my thoughts. As a journalist and author, I wrote tales in my head after I ran up mountains, walked by the desert, or paddled down rivers.
In my 30s, my husband and I raised our daughters exterior as a lot as doable, introducing them to rivers and canyons, mountains and forests. In my 40s, I ran deep into the backcountry to heal from the grief of shedding my father. The wilderness was my protected place and my muse. It was residence.
What I didn’t know was it could sometime crack me open — and put me again collectively once more.
In 2016, I used to be in a horrible accident on the Salmon River in Idaho in what was fittingly known as the River of No Return Wilderness. Falling from the raft was a sudden break on this narrative. My life, just like the raft, went the wrong way up instantly. My surgeon warned me that I ought to by no means run once more. If I did, I’d by no means run the identical as I as soon as had — simply as I might by no means be the identical. I must strengthen my thoughts to heal my physique and my coronary heart. I must redefine my relationship with the pure world, patch my shattered physique again collectively, and heal the gaping breach that had opened between my husband and me.
Because the influence of the accident set in, a part of me understood that this was an excellent factor — perhaps the easiest factor.
I’d realized about Zen by working and about working by Zen. By my lengthy restoration, a duplicate of Zen Thoughts, Newbie’s Thoughts by the late Japanese Zen grasp Shunryu Suzuki turned my fixed companion. In it he wrote, “Probably the most troublesome factor is to all the time hold your newbie’s thoughts…Within the newbie’s thoughts there are various potentialities. Within the professional’s thoughts there are few.” The accident had made me a newbie once more.
Damage stuffed me with a curious vacancy. It was like nothing I’d felt earlier than. I attempted to call it nevertheless it was too slippery for description. If I had been to call it, it could develop into one thing, when what it was, was an absence.
Going through ambiguity is inherently uncomfortable. It’s human nature to need to know the way issues will end up. Motherhood and marriage are protracted workouts in instability. Then once more, if you look intently, all of life is this fashion — we simply do an excellent job pretending in any other case, and life, for a time, lets us. However in Zen, not understanding is taken into account a type of knowledge. Being prepared to just accept uncertainty brings us nearer to the reality of life.
I didn’t know what would occur subsequent, however I knew the place to search for solutions: Mountains and rivers had all the time been my lecturers. They’d helped me heal earlier than, and would present me once more.
Rivers
The primary rule of rivers is the primary rule of Zen: Don’t struggle the present. Go along with it, not in opposition to it. On any river you want momentum, not brute power, to maneuver downstream. It’s a must to be fluid, not forceful. In the event you struggle it, you’ll by no means win. The Salmon River had been extra technical than any whitewater I’d ever run, nevertheless it was not unfriendly. It was merely itself, coursing by the wilderness. It had been as much as us to match its tempo. Just like the river, it’s important to circulation alongside the trail of least resistance.
Canyons
There’s no higher place to observe give up than on the backside of a canyon. Inside a canyon you possibly can’t see out, you possibly can solely see forward to the closest bend. It’s a must to take the water one speedy at a time. Even when you possibly can’t see the place you’re going, a canyon will carry you there. A canyon shelters you even because it exams you.
Mountains
From a distance mountains tower over you, however as you method, they appear to shrink, virtually disappear. They develop into the bushes in entrance of you, rocks underneath your ft, bits and items of a much bigger image. In Santa Fe, my each day ritual was working up Atalaya Mountain. I beat the identical well-worn path to the highest of the mountain, nevertheless it was completely different day by day. The unremitting sameness revealed, in reality, that nothing was the identical, ever. The well-known Zen grasp Eihei Dogen, a Japanese poet-philosopher who lived within the thirteenth century, as soon as wrote, “Mountains belong to individuals who love them.” I’ve recognized Atalaya so effectively and liked it for therefore lengthy, it seems like mine. However the reverse is true: I belong to the mountain.
Sky
One evening, as I paddled on a lake, Mars was rising above the bushes, gleaming orange just like the tiny, faraway tip of a matchstick. Venus was sinking and Mars was climbing, however for a second they appeared precisely equidistant, eye to eye, as if winking at one another from an awesome distance, greeting one another throughout hundreds of thousands of miles and millennia. Collectively, they made an odd, stunning symmetry. It made my head swim simply fascinated with it. Amidst all the times of brokenness, damage, and concern, had been additionally wondrous days — I felt a part of the whole lot suddenly.
Traversing the tender and typically treacherous territory of marriage at midlife, whereas additionally attempting to reconcile my self-identity as a runner with my lengthy, non-weightbearing restoration, was an exploration in nonattachment. As an alternative of conceptualizing life, I needed to be in it — proper in the midst of the stream of time unfolding. Residing this fashion, I’m in sync with the vitality of life. I’m a part of the world and it’s part of me.
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Katie Arnold is a longtime contributor to Exterior Journal. A Zen practitioner and elite ultrarunner, Katie teaches writing workshops exploring the hyperlink between motion and creativity. Her writing has been featured in The New York Occasions, The Wall Road Journal, ESPN The Journal, Runner’s World, and Elle, amongst others. Her new ebook, Brief Flashings in the Phenomenal World: Zen and the Art of Running Free (Parallax Press, April 16, 2024), is a non secular information, a story of journey, and a philosophical quest into the ultramarathon of life. Be taught extra at katiearnold.net.