Taking Care of the Spiritual Self

            I've been having kind of a rough time lately – dealing with my sister's death, then immediately afterwards completely blowing my chances to get a job I wanted by doing badly at the interview, then spinning into despondency for having done that. On top of that, it's fall term, and I'm not teaching.

            Last weekend I hiked into the Red Buttes Wilderness Area on the Frog Pond-Cameron Meadows loop trail partly to see if I could still do a difficult hike after a summer of inactivity (knee injury, excessive heat, wildfire smoke) and partly, of course, to see what the trail would offer.

            Had I forgotten that every hike offers wonders? Had I forgotten that the mountains are a sure antidote for what ails me?

            After the first steep mile, my hiking partner and I entered an enchanted forest, where a thin white line of snow turned everything it touched into lace –­ every needle of every pine tree, every stone, root, or limb, every branch of every bush, every scabrous edge of bark. 

Gradually the snow deepened until we were kicking through a half inch or more. Where the sun had visited, briefly, before it tucked behind the mountain again, winter-brown stalks rose from wet earth. We walked from snow-sprinkled woods to sun-melted patches of browns to shaded open spaces where bushes, earth, rocks, and sticks were painted white.

           Flourishes of ice decorated the edges of Frog Pond. At Cameron Meadow, just under the Mt. Emily ridge, ice had spell-bound the pool into silent immobility.

            Occasionally we could see views of the aftermath of the Seattle fire, where it had spilled over the ridge onto the Middle Fork, burning in scallops down the mountain: a beige-brown scoop of burned trees here, a clump of black evergreens there. Green forest still dominated the mountain. This had not been the kind of fire that swept so fast over the Columbia Gorge or through Napa Valley. This was a friendly fire, the kind to be grateful for.

            At one turn in the trail, we saw, through the trees, a green mountainside polka-dotted with the pointed white cones of snow-burdened evergreens. On the Cameron Meadows trail autumn leaves covered the ground like a fabric of yellow and brown hues: tawny, flaxen, buff, terra cotta, tortoiseshell. A cluster of mushrooms complemented the colors.

            Once, when I stopped walking to take in the beauty of the forest – that carpet of yellow, the early afternoon dusk, the stark linearity of a clump of tall, white-skinned madrone trunks – I saw a bear clambering down one of those long slim madrones after a meal of berries at its top, descending hind end first, looking now over the right shoulder, now over the left, scooting as fast as a fireman down a pole, a rolling black ball on a white trunk.

            Even the hour's walk at the end of the hike, from our exit at the Cameron Meadows trailhead to the car at the Frog Pond trailhead, usually boring and tedious, was enhanced that day by autumn trees and winter air.

            The next day I had a conversation with a friend about what we mean when we talk about the spiritual self (religion aside). I'm not sure I know. I long ago gave up the struggle about whether I am developing my spiritual self. It doesn't seem to matter. What does matter, and is probably relevant to that spiritual self I claim not to understand or to nourish, is that being on the mountain trail with its white beauty, its fallen leaves, and its galloping bear has left me a better person today than I was before.