Acceptance - Knowing It is Enough

Ready or not, here I go...

Oh how I wish I could actually welcome you, not to this essay but to the actual physical place where I am beginning it. Have you been to Volcano House, aged and funky and glorious, 33 rooms perched on the rim of Kilauea volcano? Base camp for my last round of training hikes, fully loaded pack finally feeling like just part of my body, glutes burning as I power lift my own weight plus a quarter up switchbacks with tall stone steps. Lava fields dotted with resilient, insistent lehua ʻohia, blossoming for the hālau practicing practicing in the final days before Merrie Monarch. Are they ready? Am I ready? Those thoughts gave birth to this essay.

Welcome once again to the tangled web inside my overactive mind.

Back “in the day” - meaning in my 20s when my first husband and I were summiting Coloradoʻs Fourteeners; and in my 30s where this Memoir began with my travel to the Himalayas, back in that day I knew nothing of VO2 max or HRV. The very basic metric I knew was to count heartbeats for 15 seconds as they ticked by on my very first Casio digital watch, and multiple by four. I measured the level of my training by heartbeat and feel. Trusting - as I did when I first found myself at 18,000 feet above sea level at Shoto Terdrom - that the body would respond and become stronger.¹

I found trusting my body harder at almost-70 than it was in my 20s and 30s. Instead, I put my trust in the training programs designed by ChatGPT and Coach Bill - and found myself in a bit of a panic during what were supposed to be my final weeks of hardest training. Two rounds of Kona low storms brought dangerous conditions, with government emergency management officials (and fallen trees and power poles) mandating that I stay off the roads. Stuck at home, my brain was spinning. I was falling short on my training goals! I felt like a slug, like my energy levels were as low as the storm system.

The feedback from others, including my trainer, was pretty much the opposite of my panicky self-perception. “Why are you worried? You know youʻve got this! You have more energy than much younger people do - and you have the mental toughness that is what it will come down to at the top of that trail.”

I have already written about how important it is to get external assessments from trusted, competent partners (human or horse), because thatʻs how our self-assessment sharpens, how our self-judgments become a more rounded, grounded picture.² I also needed to focus less on proving something to my Garmin watch, and more on what my actual body knows. I easily cover distances and elevation changes that challenged me five months ago. I can touch my deltoid or my quadricep and feel the strength those muscles have gained.

Gradually I find myself getting more and more okay with “whatever the weather and the days and my body allow will be enough.” Acceptance.

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Thatʻs on the physical conditioning side. Then there was the curriculum. I have been anxious about my level of preparation for the mental component of the journey ahead.

There were a lot of books on the lists from Freeflow Institute and from the writing instructor. Some prose and a lot of poetry. I typically read prose quickly - and in the case of The Emerald Mile, I went back and read it a second time as soon as I finished. I wanted to absorb the history of the Colorado River and what I will see next week, todayʻs Colorado River as she passes through the Grand Canyon.

I also read many of the poems in the assigned books multiple times. I re-read the poems that resonated the most. I re-read the poems that challenged me the most. After I read the anthology of Diné writing to get history and context for the poems, I read some of them for a third or fourth time.

Then I got a grip.

Have you ever learned a new language by immersion?³ There is no way to prepare for it; you just show up. Here was another opportunity to let go and trust. Immersing myself in the books will be no substitute for living the journey. Just as I had to let go of trying to understand what I will experience in advance of being in the Canyon, of being on its calm and ferocious river during a crisp spring day, and under its bright stars on a waning moon night, I had to let go of becoming a poet through a couple of months of reading. I can declare myself a dignified beginner⁴ and entrust myself to a skillful teacher.

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Photo of cactus blooming by Yara Kinds on Unsplash

Having come to some degree of Acceptance for the state of my body and mind - I came to wonder the most important question. What about my Spirit?

Am I ready for this journey spiritually, existentially?

Sigh.

There are so many milestones Iʻm feeling. Turning 70. The deaths of a couple of ex-lovers in the past 12 months and re-assessing what our stories meant and mean to me. Observing cycles and gaining new perspectives on events told in this memoir like the World Cup being hosted in the U.S.A⁵. And the installation of a new Archbishop of Canterbury⁶.

And so much water! Rains. Floods. Rivers. Tears.

My hope is that by embarking on an adventure outside of my comfort zone, seen through through the lens and form and gift of poetry that is part of it, I can make these bits and pieces into something new, possibly something with a thread of transcendence.

“Am I ready?”, I ask again. Are WE ready?

Are we all ready to let the buds of spring unfold into an exuberant summer of new possibility and realized dreams?

Letʻs check in together three weeks from now.

1. The entries from the journal I kept during my time in Tibet are Twenty Day in Tibet here and Nine Days in Shoto Terdrom here.

2. Like I wrote about last yearʻs Double Dose of My Own Medicine here. And more generally about internal observer and external observers here.

3. My time in Brazil began with learning the language - and culture - by immersion. That story here.

4. Here is how I learned the term “dignified beginner.”

5. This chapter of my memoir ends with the 1994 World Cup in the U.S. - on the road with the Brazilian press corps.

6. I am not Episcopalian/Anglican but I have a fondness for the wildly druidic 104th Archbishop of Canterbury, Rowan Williams, with whom I spent a memorable lunch and afternoon after escaping from lower Manhattan. I am excited to see a woman in that role, especially one who like my mother was a nurse and educator. A woman who for the first time in modern history chose to walk the traditional Becket Camino pilgrimage route from St Paul’s Cathedral in London to Canterbury Cathedral in preparation for her installation.