The Resilience of Wild People and Places

  

 During this most recent backpacking trip through the Pasayten Wilderness I thought about resilience a lot. Why? Because it was hard and I found myself in that familiar state of anger/frustration that, when coupled with physical discomfort and only one way out (forward), can put you in a pretty foul mood. It’s a joke of my husband and mine that our friends don’t understand why we love backpacking so much considering all the stories of painful blisters and black flies we’ve told. I think resilience is the reason. The combination of the difficult and wonderful makes for a more interesting time. More than that, it makes for an experience that feels more...rich. I think of resilience as the ability to be in a foul mood or with discomfort without letting it take over. In other words the ability to step outside the emotional jumble, if only for a moment, and appreciate the intensity and your ability to weather it. While backpacking it looks like having a real crappy morning and by the afternoon being able to laugh and call it “type two fun”. To move through the discomfort to find the afterglow of accomplishment on the other end. Or at the very least that your anger and fear do not define you. These are without a doubt the biggest lessons backpacking has taught me (is still teaching me!). The draw of this pairing of pleasure and pain feels primitive. Like it is part of my heritage as a human to walk, hurt and keep walking. To find the small lessons that walking has to offer.

My relationship with resilience has matured over time, like all good relationships do. But I do think the seed of it was always there. In fact, I think this seed is present in all humans, all mammals maybe. No, more, I think it is the thing that drives the evolution of all living things...perhaps. The movement forward in the face of change, the ability to evolve and still keep our shape (well maybe not our shape but at least our essence). Dare I say resilience is the driving force of life?! No, I don’t dare, I’m no philosopher. But I will say this: I can see that my resilience was there, even as a child. I am a daughter of a single mother and like all children of single parents I developed a certain type of resilience. It is so much harder to not have things as a child. The toys that everyone else has, new clothing, attention. Maybe when you have two parents you just go to the other when the one rejects your request. I don’t really know but that’s what I always imagined. In my house when my mother denied a request and all my mini human emotions came welling to the surface I had no other parent to appeal to so I would turn to my sister. She, having already read my mother's reaction, would turn a look on me that said “shut up, not worth it”. My mother was quick tempered and tired in a way only single parents can be. Her anger was terrifying to me and could come out of nowhere. Although she had never hit me, there was a part of me that figured anything was possible when she got mad. So I learned to take those mini human emotions and hide them. I learned to be much better at reading others feelings than my own. I have come to think of this skill as “emotion stuffing” because I don’t think those feelings ever really went away. They just build up like clutter in a closet until the door no longer holds. This type of resilience will get you out on the other end, sure. But it’s no long term strategy. As a child and into my teens and twenties I would find that eventually my emotional closet would burst. All the pent up feelings would come up to the surface, completely incongruous with whatever had triggered their release. It was an overwhelming and confusing feeling that felt like a physical net holding me tight. It was entirely out of my control. As I grew older these outbursts left me feeling shameful; frustrated with my lack of self control. It felt like a character flaw, like it was my fault I couldn’t make those feelings go away. What’s more, I couldn't move past them, the emotional release would ruin an entire day.

I imagine there are many ways to learn to move through discomfort, to recognize and deal with one’s emotions. Mindfulness Meditation teaches this skill explicitly. I’m sure many clever parents have found ways to pass this super power onto their children. In hindsight, many kids I knew learned this through forced music lessons, sports, scout groups or good old fashions talking. I was a young adult before I began to learn these skills. For me the magic recipe was a physically demanding job, the emergence of some latent competitive gene, and a coworker who decided (very vocally) that I was a wimp. I joined the Washington Conservation Corps when I was 21 and had never done physical labor as work. What I had done was live on a hobby farm with a mother who believed strongly in children doing chores and knew how to motivate the unwilling. I knew how to work hard. So I threw myself into my new job on a maintenance crew at a wildlife refuge. I was determined to never be the first to complain or the one doing the least work. It’s questionable as to how well I accomplished those goals but regardless I grew strong that year and found pride in my ability to do hard things. Even more so because as a small woman many people didn’t expect it from me.

Coincidentally that was the same year I went on my first backpacking trip. I had loved the forest as a kid and my time working at the wildlife refuge had given me an identity as someone who labored in wild places so backpacking felt like a natural hobby. I will admit however that from the get go it was a love/hate relationship. The Pacific Northwest is full of steep mountains and my memories of my first backpacking trips were like a bad grandpa story stereotype: uphill both ways… in the rain. I had an ill fitting and always over packed backpack. I hiked in my work jeans and cursed every sweaty step till I reached the top. On more than one occasion I swore to myself to never do it again but inevitably the high of getting to the top would outweigh the pain and I’d be back on trail as soon as I could. 

It wasn’t until I went through therapy and learned mindfulness techniques from a friend that I began to spend my time on trail looking at what was happening in my head. One of the most precious gifts of walking through wild places is the time it gives you with yourself. We were designed to be in these places and so they act as a subtle mirror to us. We see the groundedness of the trees and know that we too have access to that stability. The movement of flowers in the breeze is an illustration of what is possible for our own minds. To be moved but not changed. To delight in the wild daring and diverse array of our thoughts. To feel both the drought and the deluge and know that they are a cycle not a circumstance. Being given the tools to be with my emotions rather than “stuffing” them opened up a new world for me. Awareness is a powerful thing and it is an act of bravery to view life through this lense. When we bring out the things we have been hiding from ourselves they are often ugly and we have two choices: we can deny that they are a part of us or we can be humble in our knowing of that truth. Awareness creates humility and humility gives us a path forward. A way to keep confronting those parts of us that want to run away from discomfort; to sit with the desire to quit as if it was a good friend who just needs a hand to hold while climbing up that steep hill.

A couple weeks ago, while trudging through the barren landscape leftover from the 2017 Diamond Creek fire, I thought of all this. Rolling my eyes at my own optimism and cringing at the pain in my knee while climbing over another downed tree. Knowing that there is another side to these uncomfortable portions of time helps to be in them. It also helps to have the experience to know that pushing against the frustration doesn’t make it go away. That can only be accomplished through breathing, being and putting one foot in front of the other. The landscape around me was a perfect picture of this advice. The forest had no choice but to be with the fire that would consume it and after the fire passed it began the long, hard work of putting itself back together.