Growing Old – Page 6 – Two Travelin' Chicas…

Everything is Uphill

“You park here”, the lady said, “and the check in is up there.” I gazed up the hill at the beauty of this place and realized this entire week was gonna be uphill. I never really imagined what I was thinking and the depths of how real it was. Everything is uphill.

From my first step I was beginning the journey of a lifetime. I looked around at the steep grassy hills, dotted with groves of brilliant green trees. I looked at the buildings set against this stunning backdrop and noticed how each one blended in and was accented by the grassy hills. There was a peacefulness here and it was evident that this was a powerful land and this was a powerful place.

I walked slowly uphill to the retreat site and through the gate that had a large prayer wheel…what the heck, I gave it a spin and said a silent prayer as I walked through the gate. I could feel the energy emanating from all around me. At first it was intimidating but soon it washed over me in a wave of warmth and a peaceful feeling came over me. I continued uphill till I came to the first building, a sign said “Start Here”.

That was the beginning of it all. From that moment forward everything was gonna be uphill. My cabin, the main meditation hall, the dinning hall and the path that took you to the top of the beautiful hills. Even my spiritual growth would be an uphill climb. There wasn’t much further down I was willing to go, so I welcomed the energy and settled in.

That was four days ago. I have surmounted more hills both metaphysically and physically. We do a walking meditation eight times a day. At least one of those meditations I take the path to the top of the hill and explore. It is breathtakingly beautiful and in a meditative state you don’t even feel the gravity or your heart beating in your chest. Your breathing is slow and steady and with each slow methodical step you climb further up.

Scattered at the top are more trails leading off to glorious views of the surrounding countryside. Each trail has benches with makeshift alters and colorfully adorned Buddhas with prayer beads and chakra stones. The energy radiates clear up to the top of the hill from the valley below and you can gaze out and soar with the birds gliding on the air currents. Since this is a silent retreat there is no human sound short of footsteps. The deer walk right out onto the fields as you stand there. The lizards scurry around at your feet. Bees buzz as they do their busy work. The trees whisper their stories for anyone willing to listen.

I’ve learned this week that uphill can be hard and it can also be rewarding. Uphill isn’t so bad after all.

Day Three: Mindful Awareness

Each day starts out before the dawn. The sound of bells, deep, low gongs. I awoke in a great deal of pain today. Perhaps from sitting and walking…or maybe it was the bed? No matter, just one more hurdle in my day. It could be pain caused by emotional upheaval manifesting itself in physical pain. The things we put ourselves through to achieve peace of mind, body and spirit.

I roll out of bed and head to morning meditation, 6:15 sharp. The first few meditations were guided, the last few however, have been left to us and our personal practice. After sitting for forty five minutes we have walking meditation and then breakfast. Today I had a special awareness on my walking meditation. I heard a small bird calling in the morning light, hidden away inside a tree. I paused and listened to its tiny calls and finally found it amongst the tangle of branches…it was the smallest hummingbird sitting on a branch singing away. It sat and watched me as I listened. Nothing else around was present, just me and this small bird. I thanked it for its early morning song, and continued on my walk. It is this awareness, this awakening that can only be achieved in a silent meditation.

Have I told you how loud silence is? Silence is very loud at times and very calming others. I can hear the pounding of my heart, the rush of blood through my head, my belly is always making very loud noises since I am eating delicious food that is totally foreign to its system. In silence you can here the wind, you can here the rustling of the trees, every sound you normally wouldn’t even notice is ten times louder when no one is speaking. You can hear birds feathers on the wind as they glide by. In silence I have come to appreciate all that goes unnoticed. You can hear distant buzzing from the bees collecting nectar. The world is silent when we are making sounds and full of incredible sounds when we are quiet.

I have also noticed, when silent, all other senses are heightened. Like I said earlier, I hear even the smallest sound. I wish I could bottle the smell of the air here. My eyes see colors more vividly. My mind thinks clearer. I just want to touch everything as if it were for the first time. A heightened awareness of all my surroundings. The world is alive an vibrant and I have only to be silent to take it all in.

Day Two: The Road to Change

I just completed my first full day at Spirit Rock Meditaion Retreat Center in Woodacre, California. I have run the entire gambit of emotions in the last fifteen hours. I have cried silently, laughed silently and waged battle, silently, with acceptance. I have sat in meditation for eight long hours. I have walked slowly, silently for another eight. I have listened to the teachers as they have reached inside of me, grabbed hold of all my fears and opened the flood gates. I was brought face to face with my darkest demons and tried to make some peace.

Today has been a whirlwind ride into a place I haven’t been in a long time, myself. Here at the retreat we are devoid from outside interference. We all have entered into “noble silence”. We have a life line available to us at anytime if the experience gets to intense, to decompress and seek clarity and direction. This is no cake walk and these teachers are here to guide us and lift us up. It is up to me to decide what I get from this. Trust me, the last three sitting meditations were tough to attend.

This retreat is about Mindfulness. It’s about learning to love all parts of you. To embrace all you fears and felt inadequacies with kindness and acknowledging short comings. It’s about generating a compassionate inner being. Compassion for oneself is needed in order to give it. Love is needed for oneself in order to give it. Understanding how to internalize the good even in a messed up world. This retreat is about me and whatever I choose to take from it. Breakdown the walls, embracing whatever comes up, owning it and embracing it with love and compassion.

Day One: Finding Oneself

It’s my fifty fifth birthday. Life has been good to me without a doubt. Hard work and perseverance have paid off… but at what price? I have money, love, a great life partner, my own business, a beautiful house and means. Lately however I have lost something more important than all of those things… ME.

Sure I am happy and content on the outside, but the inside is a jumble of confusion, sadness and spiritual decay. This has led to depression and anger. So much so that those around me the most are often times the recipients or at least the observers of my unintentional and uncontrolled outbursts. It’s hard to accept, admit and own up to this. It’s harder still to accept it as a dark part of me and seek out ways to change.

Well change is exactly what I must do before all that lies behind me is a path of destruction… before I find myself alone. I know from my past lessons learned that inside of me is a constant battle. I’ve learned that when an imbalance occurs I must take a step back and gain equilibrium…I must put myself and my well-being above all else, or there will be nothing else.

This coming week I have chosen to attend a silent residential meditation retreat. I have chosen to place myself in the middle of nowhere, to disconnect from the outside world, to turn inside to my world and do some renovations. I have chosen to put my life and well-being in the hands of the teachers. I have chosen to be torn down and built back up. I have chosen to face my demons and fight the battle waging within. It is quite literally my life on the line. Not physically, but spiritually and emotionally. My foundation is not as strong as it once was.

This weeks goal is to root out the anger, frustration, sadness and whatever other little monsters I find lurking, and face them head on. To make peace with those demons. To find balance once again. I accept, acknowledge and own them. To find the spiritual tools to once again feel whole and grounded. It’s a path of enlightenment and peace. I will listen to the Buddha’s teachings and embrace the dharma. I will listen to, and take direction from the teachers and learn to live in spiritual harmony with all the good and bad within me. This is my path and mine alone.

A Warm Summers Day

The dog fought me for my foot space. My partner lay beside me snoring. The pale morning light turned the blinds a rosy pink color. I turned over to see the blurry clock 12 feet away… 6:54am. Sigh…

I rolled over and kicked one leg out from under the covers. The air was cool, both from the AC and ceiling fan. Gandaulf lay horizontal across the end of the bed having little fits as he dreamed whatever dogs dream about. I listened to the crickets and birds from my iPads white noise app that I’ve listened to every night for over 5 years. I slid out of bed and made my way upstairs.

The day was splendidly blue and cloudless. The shadows grew shorter and exposed the vibrant greens of the aspens. I rubbed my eyes and went about making coffee. I opened the back door to free the stagnant night air and let in the cool morning. Coffee ready and I moved to the deck to begin my morning.

Welcome to July and a new start to my life.

I sat on the edge of my chair and pulled the foot stool closer and crossed my legs, turned on some meditation music and began to breathe. With each breath I could feel a wave of calm come over me. I noticed all the tiny butterflies, the chickadees playing in the woods, the lazy lizards basking in the sun, warming their bodies from the night chill. The world around me felt a little more alive than I had noticed previously.

This is it. This is my new morning ritual. A daily awakening of the mind, body and spirit. It’s only one tool in my otherwise empty coping tool box. It’s about me and has to be. I’ve been down this road before. I know what needs to be done.

I am beginning a new path of spiritual and mental healing. All that I took for granted, all I assumed would just be there, was gone but now is coming back and more real than ever. Like riding a bike, once I began to quiet my mind and began practicing meditation again, the peace began to flood back into me little waves at a time.

A Time of Change

As my silent inner war rages, I am forced to put on a happy face and try to blend in. The struggle inside is exacerbated by daily stresses I am trying to control. My little blue helper has finally quit making me sick… is it working? The fact that I have to take any chemicals in order to keep on an even keel haunts me everyday as I screw off the bottle’s cap and swallow the blue pill inside. Why have I lost the ability to control my outbursts? Why am I so angry inside? My life is good yet these demons rage on inside in the recesses of my brain… my very soul.

I studied with a shaman last time things got this out of control. For a year we met 3 days a week. For the first six months he never spoke to me. We would walk through the woods in silence. We would sit in silence in the sweat lodge, the only sound was him singing and playing his hypnotic drum. We would sit around the fire at night and stare into the flames, not making a sound. Little did I know, this was all part of my healing. Sitting in silence makes you face your demons head on, with no human outside influences. Finally, one Saturday evening around the fire, he spoke in the softest voice… “you are no longer angry, now we can begin.” Six more months he taught me all he could.

That was back in 1987/8. Today I remember the feelings I felt, the inner struggles that waged on. I remember the serenity I finally achieved after months of hard work and those weekends in the woods. In the end he gave me a native flute and told me that this would be my avenue to sooth the angry beast inside. Even though I long for that serenity again, I can no seem to find those tools I learned. I find myself seeking out guidance in the form of meditation, Thai chi, maybe I should just become a Buddhist. There are people out there that feed on people’s longings, but only for profit. Then there are places that really do sincerely cater to the desire to become whole again, to find peace, to nourish the tired, battered soul. I have determined that this is what I must do.

I spoke of my struggles with depression in my last post. I hate being so selfish and dragging those around me into my torment. I wish that this would just all go away and I could just go back to being happy go lucky, not a care in the world. I am caught between a rock and a hard space. The more I feed into this, the more out of control I feel. When I was younger, and not as responsible as I am today, it was easy to just blow off things in the pursuit of eternal happiness…if there really is such an animal. I did find a moment in time of devine serenity and having tasted it once, I am in search of this elusive butterfly again.

When Life Deals You Lemons

In the last six months life hasn’t been exactly easy. The stresses of being a business owner for 16 years have taken its toll on me both mentally and physically. My dream of being retired and traveling died out in flames as the buyer for our business fell through. Shame on me for wanting to believe until the end.

So let’s fast forward to June. I have been battling with bouts of depression, I believe is mostly stress related. I found it increasingly difficult to control emotional outbursts. I became increasingly more angry at everything it seemed. I was caught in a spiral that I no longer had control over. I no longer had the tools in my life to deal with any of this. To say I was a ticking time bomb is to put it mildly.

We worked it out that I would go to part time. Only work in the back with the new cars coming in. Not dealing with customers that I hate. I found that the very lifeblood of our business, people buying cars, was sending me into fits of rage. Some of my employees were constantly pissing me off and when I came down on them, they would run to my partner and exaggerate what happened, making it all my issues and none of theirs. It was time for me to step aside.

My life is needing an overhaul. I sat down and wrote two lists: one of tasks around the house that had been neglected and the other what I was gonna do for Me to change my life. The second list was the most vital. In order for me to climb out of this deep dark, lonely hole I find myself in, I have to develop tools that will balance my core, my very soul. I am sick, emotionally and spiritually. I have given up every ounce of my being to survive day to day. Over kill? Trust me… I am on some serious shaky ground that scares even myself.

The week all this came to a head, two prominent figures committed suicide. Anthony Bourdain and Kate Spade. Both, like myself, have it made. They have all the money one could wish for. Fame and notoriety didn’t buy them happiness. They died slow painful deaths emotionally then ended their torture by taking their physical lives. It saddens me that an act so permanent… so selfish… was their only way out of the silent, torturous lives they were living. So I reached out for help.

Admitting that your life is out of control to those around you is tough. Some look on you as flawed. Others avoid you. Some tell you it’s all in your head, you have a great life. Perhaps this is why we suffer in silence. Being pushed aside, avoided, told to get over it, is not helpful. It drives us deeper into our own silence and demons. At wits end we seek out medication to hopefully balance out our “chemical imbalance”. Some little pill that will stop our uncontrolled outbursts. I’ll be the first to admit that I need a little help in the meantime, while I find myself again. While I find the balance in my life.

So my life has dealt me lemons… right now I want to squish them and throw them at all the people I blame for my feeling this way. Hopefully, in the near future, I will be able to make lemonade and sit back and slowly enjoy it.

The Baja California Sur Adventure

The nicest thing about coming to The Baja is the closeness and direct flights available from Salt Lake. In less than four hours, you can be digging your toes into the warm sand, sipping a salt rimmed margarita and watching the waves.

It’s pretty easy to get Gandaulf into Mexico so he gets to vacation with us. He’s such a great traveler. He steals everyone’s heart and I never tire hearing people taking his picture or listen to them comment on how cute he is. He just prances on in his service jacket, ears pinned back, taking care of his mom, always alert. When we get to the beach, it’s all about the ball.

We got to Baja on Sunday. It’s a quick little battery recharge vacation. We spend the day bouncing from the waves to the pool and back again. We found the quaintest little Hotel in Cabo Pulmo called VidaSoul. It’s quite literally in the middle of nowhere. It’s about an hour drive across the east cape of The Baja. The drive itself is part of the adventure. The directions consist of a few pictures and some approximate mileages of where to turn. It was quite easy to get off track, or miss a turn because in the desert, things are in a constant state of change. A windy day can push a pile of sand to the other side of a turn and the picture may not look like what is actually there now.

We ended up in the city dump, literally, and I had to use my best Spanish to try to get directions from an old Mexican guy who apparently works there. We missed one of the turns because it no longer looked like the picture or a sign was missing. We made our way back to the correct road and were off again.

The road was a sand wash for the most part and the closer we got to the arroyo it was evident that storms from the past summer had washed out huge sections of the surrounding area. Coming over the rise we could see the hotel was an oasis sitting atop a sand dune and visible from almost anywhere. It’s white and grey exterior poised high atop a pile of sand with the arroyo about 400 yards away. It is right on the beach and very private.

They call this place The Crossroads. It’s origin was a dream of an expat and her son. This monolith came about from a small shack on the beach with a thatched roof. The owners son designed the whole Hotel with not a detail missed. All the cement was mixed by hand. It took nine years to complete. It has a grand staircase that goes down to a uniquely designed pool which is quite literally a hole dug in the beach. It is surrounded by sand, a few beach lounges and some material strung between some poles for shade. The pool has a bar in the center. In order to get to the bar, the bartender must wade out to the pit in the center. The bridge idea never materialized.

From the pool and the restaurant you can gaze out across the water and watch the whales spouting and playing. You can watch the Mexican hand fishers in their little skiffs. You can take in the crashing waves and the sea breezes. The staff is very attentive and your glass is always topped off, a fresh bottle of water, or a little something from the restaurant. Whatever it was we ordered it never disappointed.

Chris and I just don’t like the crowds or touristy areas much anymore so VidaSoul was the perfect getaway. Being in the middle of nowhere, they have made a concerted effort to use solar power and keep it eco friendly. They do have a generator that runs most all night in order to keep the AC on and give its guests a comfortable night sleep.

The rooms are quite spacious. VidaSoul offers meal plans that help offset the meal costs. The portion sizes are huge. The bartender makes the best margaritas. The food was fresh and delicious and the drink pours were more than fair. We aren’t in Utah baby! We would highly recommend a visit to this oasis if traveling the road around the coastline of the east cape.

Life on Life’s Terms

The saying, “the best made plans…”, finish as you would. Our lives have taken a slight U turn.

About five years ago, we made the decision to sell off All we own, buy a plane ticket to Ecuador, and “retire”. We worked really hard to save all our pennies… set up ourselves to retire with means enough to live comfortably. We put our business on the market in January 2017, started selling off the “stuff” we have accumulated over the last 25 years and started planning our escape.

At first we had planned a getaway to a nice country, hoped to secure a long term rental then travel out from there. That soon turned into a road trip in a 1998 Land Cruiser we picked up cheap. We spent the next 9 months rigging it up for Overlanding. Again those plans were laid to rest after a quick trip to Iceland, where we rented a VW Krafter van converted into a rudimentary camper van. The focus switched to buying a Sprinter or Transit van and converting it into a camper. Let’s face it… we are a bit older than most who are Overlanding in an SUV. Small things like being able to stand up, get out of the weather, and the ability to cook inside when needed, became key needs.

That brings us to this current year 2018.

The business sale never materialized, even after a young man came in a couple times a month for six months, promising us we would close by the beginning of the year. The beginning of the year came and went. Every attempt he made to secure financing fell away. We were forced to resign ourselves to the fact this could be harder than we originally anticipated. He’s now a salesperson for us.

We did find a great deal on a 2015 Ford Transit van with the eco boost engine, which will give us similar gas mileage to the diesel Sprinter yet we won’t need to worry about any of the diesel emissions garbage they throw on the Sprinter. We were still proceeding as if we would be leaving for our adventure, even though the future was uncertain at best.

I was devastated when I realized that I was bound to Utah for another winter. I really wanted to believe that “the kid” would come through and buy us out. I feel as if the dealership is a means to an end, but also could be my end. The stress levels of being a business owner are sometimes insurmountable for me. Chris is my rock. She always picks me up, dusts me off, and convinces me everything will work out as it should… just get the hell out of the way. If you keep trying to stick a square peg in a round hole, eventually something is bound to give… that something is usually my mental and emotional health.

So today, I am sitting at a small metal table, in the middle of no where, on the east cape of the Baja of Mexico. I dream that this will someday be a big part of our lives. We are watching the whales breach just a couple hundred yards off the beach, Gandaulf is resting with his head on my bare feet, the smell of the salt water and the sound of the waves, lulls me into a trance and rests my uneasy soul. It’s hard to accept life on life’s terms.

Winter Escape

Sometimes, in the cold gray winter months I need to get away. If I can get into the sun, feel the warm sun on my bare arms and breathe clean air… I can recharge my depleted batteries with a little solar energy. Where does one go to accomplish such a task without a full on vacation? Well for me it’s a quick trip to Phoenix Arizona.

It’s something about the desert. Something that draws me in. Something about the solitude one can find in the desert. In an environment as harsh as the desert, one can fill the batteries indeed. All time seems to stand still. Everything around me is in a state of suspended animation. Even in the winter months each tiny plant struggles to eek out an existence in this beautiful but deadly landscape.

I can drift off for hours without noticing time’s passage. My mind empties of all pressing matters, if only for a reserved amount of time. Soon enough I will make my home in such a place.