Hiking Tennessee

Which is what I’ll be doing for the next ten months. I recently was given a book contract to day hike all the state parks and two of the national parks in Tennessee—about 120 trails ranging from one to ten miles in length.

Panther Creek State Park

It’s all very exciting—a literal “Wilderness Road.” I’ll be learning about all aspects of Tennessee, from its geography and ecology to its flora and fauna. And, obviously, I’ll be spending a lot of time alone. I am thinking of this as my “La Vie Bohème: Or living a hermitic gypsy life for a year”. So to speak.

I will, of course, be car camping, and sleeping in a tent, not a vardo. And, not backpacking as when I through-hiked the Appalachian Trail. But, I’ll be moving around the state from the Mississippi River in the west to the Blue Ridge Mountains in the east. Did you know that Tennessee borders more states than any other (well, at least from my brief glance at an atlas)—Missouri, Arkansas, Mississippi, Alabama, Georgia, North Carolina, Virginia and Kentucky. Eight states. It is long and thin, which means a wide variety of terrain.

Not unlike my home state, Georgia, land-wise the largest state East of the Mississippi, which embodies everything from the Blue Ridge Mountains in the north to the coast on the Atlantic ocean with its numerous barrier islands and the wiregrass and flatlands in the southeast (and the famous Okefenokee Swamp) to the rolling red hills in the southwest where you can even find an erosion-created canyon.

So, I am excited to explore Tennessee, which I know only from my time along the A.T. and other trips to the Great Smoky Mountains. Only more recently, did I have the chance to hike Panther Creek State Park (still in the east) with my sister and nephew. I look forward to seeing it again in the spring and maybe spotting some of the trout lilies that bloom there.

I start October 1^st and my first park will be the Cherokee-centered Red Clay State Park. No camping there, just one short trail, but it seems like a good start because it’s just north of the Georgia border.

Griffin and Victoria tent-camping on the Serengeti many moons ago.

So, during the next 10 months, The Wilderness Road, in addition to other spiritual meanderings, will feature those things I discover while exploring a new state and, perhaps, a new state of mind.

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Autumn Twilight

Autumn Twilight, Dwelling Among Mountains

In empty mountains after the new rains,
it’s late. Sky-ch’i has brought autumn –

bright moon incandescent in the pines,
crystalline stream slipping across rocks.

Bamboo rustles: homeward washerwomen.
Lotuses waver: a boat gone downstream.

Spring blossoms wither away by design,
but a distant recluse can stay on and on.

~~Wang Wei, 8th Century

The Paradox of Opposites

I keep putting off writing this, but when my horoscope said recently, “Live with the paradox of knowing that everything is okay and not okay at the very same time,” it seemed very apropos.

It was one of my Zen Transformation cards that set me to pondering the paradox of opposites—the fact that where opposites are involved, there cannot be one without the other. That is, there is no darkness without light, good without evil, etc.

As Osho said, “Mind is a kind of prism—pass a ray of white light through it and immediately it is divided into seven colors. Pass anything through the mind and it becomes dual. Life and death are not life-and-death, the reality is lifedeath. It should be one word, not two; not even a hyphen in between. Lifedeath is one phenomenon. Lovehate is one phenomenon. Darknesslight is one phenomenon. Negativepositive is one phenomenon. But when you pass this one phenomenon through the mind, the one is divided immediately in two. Lifedeath becomes life and death–not only divided but death becomes antagonistic to life. They are enemies. Now you can go on trying to make these two meet, and they will never meet.”

Actually, I think they can meet, but they can never be more than acquaintances. We can introduce ourselves to death and come to terms with it as a fact of life. We will all die. When the sun sets at night, we know that it will rise again in the morning despite the fact the darkness seems unending at the time, and when the trees lose their leaves in the fall, we know that they will return with the spring.

When we work toward wholeness in the process of individuation, we must work with reconciling those opposites, the paradox within our selves.

Psychoanalyst Carl G. Jung states it this way in his book “Answer to Job”, written in 1952:

“The metaphysical process is known to the psychology of the unconscious as the individuation process. In so far as this process, as a rule, runs its course unconsciously as it has from time immemorial, it means no more than that the acorn becomes an oak, the calf a cow, and the child an adult. But if the individuation process is made conscious, consciousness must confront the unconscious and a balance between the opposites must be found. As this is not possible through logic, one is dependent on symbols which make the irrational union of opposites possible. They are produced spontaneously by the unconscious and are amplified by the conscious mind.

“The difference between the ‘natural’ individuation process, which runs its course unconsciously, and the one which is consciously realized, is tremendous. In the first case consciousness nowhere intervenes; the end remains as dark as the beginning. In the second case so much darkness comes to light that the personality is permeated with light, and the consciousness necessarily gains in scope and insight. The encounter between conscious and unconscious has to ensure that the light which shines in the darkness is not only comprehended by the darkness, but comprehends it. The filius solis et lunae is the symbol of the union of opposites as well as the catalyst of their union. It is the alpha and omega of the process, the mediator and intermedius. ‘It has a thousand names,’ say the alchemists, meaning the source from which the individuation process rises and the goal towards which it aims is nameless, ineffable.

“But empirically is can be established, with a sufficient degree of probability, that there is in the unconscious an archetype of wholeness which manifests itself spontaneously in dreams, etc., and a tendency, independent of the conscious will, to relate other archetypes to this centre. Consequently, it does not seem improbable that the archetype of wholeness occupies as such a central position which approximates it to the God-image. The similarity is further borne out by the peculiar fact that the archetype produces a symbolism which has always characterized and expressed the Deity.

“The religious need longs for wholeness, and therefore lays hold of the images of wholeness offered by the unconscious, which, independently of the conscious mind, rise up from the depths of our psychic nature.

“. . . it is well to remind ourselves of Saint Paul and his split consciousness: on one side he felt he was the apostle directly called and enlightened by God, and, on the other side, a sinful man who could not pluck out the ‘thorn in the flesh’ and rid himself of the Satanic angel who plagued him. That is to say, even the enlightened person remains what he is, and is never more than his own limited ego before the One who dwells within him, whose form has no knowable boundaries, who encompasses him on all sides, fathomless as the abysms of the earth as vast as the sky.”

I’ll leave this with a smidgen of a poem from the Gnostic Gospels that celebrates this paradox:

The Thunder, Perfect Mind

For I am knowledge and ignorance.

I am shame and boldness.

I am shameless; I am ashamed.

I am strength and I am fear.

I am war and peace.

It is a lengthy poem, but you can read it in its (mostly) entirety here at Erik Andrulis’ blog: Anacephalaeosis

Someone else is happy . . .

. . . with LESS than what you have.

Self-Acceptance

Heart’s-ease

It has become my pattern to begin my mornings by going to the Osho Zen Tarot site and “trying” a single card from the Osho Transformation deck. I’ve been using the Zen tarot cards that I own as a tool for self-discovery, and enjoy using the Transformation deck as yet another tool.

As I have been on the road for a more than a week, I thought this would be a good time to share one of the cards I received this week, which I found particularly illuminating.

Heart’s-ease in the king’s garden

You cannot improve upon yourself. And I am not saying that improvement does not happen, remember–but you cannot improve upon yourself. When you stop improving upon yourself, life improves you. In that relaxation, in that acceptance, life starts caressing you, life starts flowing through you. Nobody else has ever been like you and nobody else will ever be like you; you are simply unique, incomparable.

Accept this, love this, celebrate this–and in that very celebration you will start seeing the uniqueness of the others, the incomparable beauty of the others.

Love is possible only when there is a deep acceptance of oneself, the other, the world. Acceptance creates the milieu in which love grows, the soil in which love blooms.

I have heard:

A king went into his garden and found wilted and dying trees, shrubs and flowers. The oak said it was dying because it could not be tall like the pine. Turning to the pine, he found it drooping because it was unable to bear grapes like the vine. And the vine was dying because it could not blossom like the rose. He found Heart’s-ease blooming and as fresh as ever. Upon inquiry, he received this reply:

“I took it for granted that when you planted me you wanted Heart’s-ease. If you had desired an oak, a vine or a rose, you would have planted them. So I thought that since you put me here, I should do the best I can to be what you want. I can be nothing but what I am, and I am trying to be that to the best of my ability.”

You are here because this existence needs you as you are. Otherwise somebody else would have been here!–existence would not have helped you to be here, would not have created you. You are fulfilling something very essential, something very fundamental, as you are. If God wanted a Buddha he could have produced as many Buddhas as he wanted. He produced only one Buddha–that was enough, and he was satisfied to his heart’s desire, utterly satisfied. Since then he has not produced another Buddha or another Christ.

He has created you instead. Just think of the respect that the universe has given to you! You have been chosen, not Buddha, not Christ, not Krishna. You will be needed more, that’s why. You fit more now. Their work is done, they contributed their fragrance to existence. Now you have to contribute your fragrance.

But the moralists, the puritans, the priests, they go on teaching you, they go on driving you crazy. They say to the rose, “Become a lotus.” And they say to the lotus, “What are you doing here? You have to become something else.” They drive the whole garden crazy, everything starts dying–because nobody can be anybody else, that is not possible.

That’s what has happened to humanity. Everybody is pretending. Authenticity is lost, truth is lost, everybody is trying to show that he is somebody else. Just look at yourself: you are pretending to be somebody else. And you can be only yourself–there is no other way, there has never been, there is no possibility that you can be anybody else. You will remain yourself. You can enjoy it and bloom, or you can wither away if you condemn it.