Of Mist And Lakes And Roads That Only Go Up

I woke to a strange sound, it was the sound of utter silence.  For those first few moments on waking, peace and quiet held rein and I was loathe to disturb them.  I eased myself out of my sleeping bag, unzipped the fly sheet of the tent and peeked out.  The sight that greeted me was not the one I had been hoping for, nor the one I had been expecting, this was even better.

It took a few moments for my eyes to perceive and for my sleepy brain to comprehend what it was that I was seeing.  Instead of an early morning sun shining brightly down onto the waters of the lake and the forests and hills across in the distance, I was presented with a veil of a grey misty nothing.  The mist had descended during the night and now it blanketed everything.  The air was completely still.  It was not the leaves on the trees that proved it to me, it was the surface of the lake that was a sheet of silky, smooth, glass with not a single ripple or movement to be seen.  This morning was as perfectly still as one could hope to find.

The misty morning at Lake Maraetai, Mangakino

The stillness of the morning was soon disrupted by the arrival of the first of a continuous stream of cars, people and boats, all coming down to make use of the lake on a Sunday morning.  It did not matter, I needed to be up and away and on my way to Taupo.  The owner of the Bus Stop Cafe, literally a bus at the lakeside, had informed me that the road to Taupo would be a continuous, uphill gradient, but I was sceptical.  Roads that go up, always must go down I reassured myself.  With only 50km to cycle, I was looking forward to an easy day, so I was not in a particular rush to get on the bike, choosing to stay for a coffee and watch the wake boarding action and all the comings and goings around the lake before I set off.

The road went up.  And up.  And up.  At least it felt that way.  It was not steep by any means, rather a gentle gradient that slowly and surely sapped the strength out of the legs.  But this was not to be the biggest problem of the late morning.  The wind, that was non-existent in the early morning stillness, was now gusting and worse still, it was gusting into me and across me.  It was the wind, that seemingly ever present demon of my travels, that sapped the energy out of me and drained my morale.  It was impossible to gain any kind of momentum and between wind and hills, I tired quickly.  I tried not to look at my cycle computer because I knew it made for depressing reading, just another thing to reduce my morale still further.  My easy ride?  Huh!

I stopped for lunch and a break after 25km and it was needed.  As I sat atop a gatepost, eating my way through a still warm and utterly delicious steak and mushroom pie, I planned the road ahead.  I would cycle 10km more, then stop again, then another 10km, stop, and finally I could push out the final 5km or so into Taupo.  Back on the bike, I started off once more, cursing the wind, cursing the hills, shouting to no one, yelling to everyone, but my voice was carried away to fade out and disappear, to become lost, the way that I was feeling out here on my own amongst the fields, the sparse trees and the brown hills of  dry summer.

As I reach that next 10km mark, I pushed on.  I told myself that if I can get through 2km more, it will put me 2km further down the road, and 2km closer to Taupo and my goal.  I pushed on though.  As I reached 40km for the day, everything changed.  The road began to descend through some pine forest that sheltered me from the wind and my speed picked up.  I had barely managed 18km/h all day and here I was flying along at close to 40km/h.  At one point, as I glanced down at my cycle computer to see 54km/h, I let out my own barbaric yawp, a yawp of which Whitman would have been proud.   I was fast closing in on Taupo and knew that I would not stop again this day.  There was one final kick though, a sharp, steep hill to climb up and over, so I put my head down, dropped down the gears, found a rhythm and pumped it through.  On a bike, it does not matter how slow you go uphill, all that matters is that you find the right gear, you find that rhythm, and you pass the test.  Every hill is my own personal Mont Ventoux, my own Alpe d'Huez.

At the top of that final hill, I knew I had passed all the tests that the day had given me.  Lake Taupo was ahead of me, its water choppy, dark and wholly uninviting, and there was the town nestled by the shore.  I had made it through another day and I knew that tomorrow I did not have to climb back into the saddle.  For that, both I and my backside were eternally grateful.

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To Fight, Or Not To Fight? That Is The Question

It has recently been brought to my attention, that two words more than any others tend to feature in my writing.  Those are the words love and fight.  I must wholeheartedly agree that I do use the word love frequently, since it is my belief that love is the driving force behind life, and as such, is one of the most important words ever written.  So then, what about the word fight?  Why would that word occur so often and is my use of it indicative of some deeper subconscious thinking, some underlying thought that shapes my life?

Fight.  I went to the internet and typed it into Google and I found this as the second part of a definition: struggle to overcome, eliminate, or prevent.  It is the first term used here that instinctively connects with me - the struggle to overcome.  When I write about the fight, I am writing about the need to overcome all of the barriers and impediments to achieving your dreams and your goals in life.  Given enough time and determination, it is possible to succeed, and to find yourself walking on your one true path, that path which will lead you to glory, and to the discovery of the light that resides within.  In his writing, Paulo Coelho refers to this as 'fighting the good fight', and it is this sentiment that I often echo in my own writing through the expression of my own thoughts and experiences.  Walking the path is not easy.  Many times you will find yourself challenged, banging your head against a seemingly impenetrable barrier, and these are the times when it is necessary to take a stand and fight for what it is that your heart would have you do.    

 

When I was first confronted with the idea that I am constantly fighting, my initial reaction was one of dismissal.  I try to live my life in as peaceful, calm and quiet existence as is possible, but at the same time, I also knew that the words that I read touched a nerve and rankled me.  They could only do that if there was an element of truth in them, and I knew, deep down inside that there was a real truth in them.  My whole life has been a fight, or perhaps it is better to describe it as a series of fights.  I fought for the love and affection of my parents; I fight to be accepted by my brother; I continually fight against seeing myself as overweight; I fought my way from working on a factory production line and to a successful career; I fought to give up smoking; I fought to gain recognition and acceptance from my superiors and peers at work; I fought against the voice inside of my heart that told me all I had to do was to be myself; I fought to win the heart of girls and women who perhaps did not deserve me; I still fight to see my own reflection as something other than unattractive; I fight to see my soul as better than worthless.  In short, my entire life has been and still is a fight, and the one fight that governs it all, the one overarching theme, is the fight for love and acceptance.    

My friend wrote that it seemed to her that I was always fighting for love and for life, and that perhaps I should try to see them as friends, rather than the fire breathing dragon against which I, like a knight from Arthurian legend, am always fighting.  I read her e-mail once, I went away and I read it again a little time later.  As I read through this second time, a ray of sunlight shone out from behind the clouds, shooting forth its life giving golden beam of light.  It was as though I had been stripped down naked and my soul laid bare.  A truth had been revealed to me and I felt the weight of its meaning and the repercussions that will surely come from the discovery of it.

Throughout my entire life, or at least for as long as my memory allows me to know, I have seen and portrayed myself as an underdog.  I am Rocky Balboa, plucked from obscurity to take on the heavy weight champion of the world, Apollo Creed; I am Luke Skywalker up against the might of the Empire; Ernest Shackleton and his men, lost and alone in the Antarctic, battling against hunger, the bitter cold, and the extremities of life at the South Pole; I see myself as the hapless guy from one of those romantic comedies that Hollywood churns out, who falls for the girl that fails to see him for all that he is, until finally the light dawns and he wins her over; I am the archetypal superhero, who must surely be counted down and out, whose cause seems to be all but lost, before rising once more to vanquish his enemy.  I have always had great empathy for the underdogs in life, for I count myself as one in their number. 

The way in which I have lived my life, can perhaps best be summed up by a verse from Walt Whitman's poem, A Song Of Joys:- 

O to struggle against great odds, to meet enemies undaunted!
To be entirely alone with them, to find how much one can stand!
To look strife, torture, prison, popular odium, face to face!
To mount the scaffold, to advance to the muzzles of guns with perfect nonchalance!
To be indeed a God!

Until now.  The light that switched on in my head has revealed to me the errors that I have been making.  Why should I find myself fighting for the love of a person who is not reciprocating in kind?  A love not given freely is no love worth attaining.  Why should I persist in destroying the foundations on which my life stands, only to have to build it up once more?  What I realised is that there are certain times and situations that will require me to fight - the bringing to fruition of my dreams and the yearnings of my heart are those times.  In all other situations, I must cease my fighting.  There is a need for acceptance and through this acceptance, I believe I can begin to find some peace in my heart.  If I have to fight for the recognition of my achievements, if I have to fight in order for someone to see me for the person who I am, then these people truly do not deserve me.  They have no right to have a place in my life and my continuation with them serves me no purpose.  If fact, it is detrimental, negative, and hurtful.  Certainly things I really could do without.  There is enough to get on with in life, without having these kinds of people involved.  It does not necessarily mean that I will eliminate them entirely, for surely some of these people I cannot eliminate from my life, but it does mean that I have to ignore them and not to think of their reactions to me as a sense of failure on my part.  I cannot waste my energy trying to make people like me and want to spend time with me.  Either you do, or you do not and if you do, then surely I will know it, I will never have to question it, and I will never have to chase you.

That is a new realisation.  A sense of failure on my part.  Yes, that is exactly how I have always seen it.  That is why I fight so hard.  I try to show everyone that rightness of myself, my thoughts and my beliefs.  I feel a strong need to justify myself and my actions.  I am driven by this need to not be a failure, to be somehow better, stronger, more self-sufficient, more able.  I can see that now and I am able to see how it has governed and shaped my entire life.  I need to work on this understanding, to know that it is perfectly acceptable for someone not to like everything that I do or say, to accept that I cannot make everyone like me, that it is perfectly normal to fail sometimes, and perhaps most importantly of all, that it is okay to show weakness and vulnerability to others.  I cannot always be the rock, nor can I always be the shoulder on which others seek to lean.  If someone does not see me for who I am and all I can offer, that is not my failure, that is their failure to open their eyes fully and to see the person that stands before them.

I need to let things take their natural course.  I have to back off and allow situations to play out naturally and of their own free will.  There is no amount of force that I can bring to bear against another person's heart that could possibly alter what is written there.  Love either exists, or it does not.  There is either a desire to be with me, or there is not.  You can accept me, or you cannot.  Someone will either want to be part of my life, to know me, to understand the person that I am, or they will not.  What I have to be able to do is to find peace and acceptance with that, rather than perceiving it as a challenge, as another barrier to be overcome.  Perhaps this all sounds so simple and obvious, and I suppose it is now that I have written it down and thought it through, but when you live your own life, those things that you do out of pure instinct and old, rigid and habitual behaviours, are incredibly hard to see, let alone change.

Peace with love and peace with life.  It is for those things that I shall choose to seek and strive.  And it is my belief, that in so-doing, I will also find an inner peace within myself and most importantly, within my heart.  Perhaps it is the tormented soul that brings out the poet in me, perhaps I have not been alone in my struggles with life and how I have seen myself, perhaps I share that with other poets and tortured souls.  That does not necessarily justify that thinking, nor does it make it right.  So Walt, I say this to you.  You can keep your struggles against great odds, and you can indeed go alone to meet enemies undaunted, for I make this promise to myself: I will look for peace in love and peace in life and fight only for that next step which takes me just a little further along the path of my dreams.  If you want to walk with me, then do so because you truly wish to be there, for if not, I am done fighting to have you in my life and I bid you adieu.

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Barbaric Yawps And Why They Are Absolutely Necessary

The sun beats down upon me, it's relentless heat seeps into my skin, causing droplets of perspiration to form on my brow, on my neck, on my chest.  I'm breathing hard now, sucking great gulps of air into my lungs, fighting for my breath, in desperate need of oxygen.  I'm standing up on my pedals, my legs continue to push hard, one, two, one, two, over and over, as I sway the bike from side to side, in the rhythmic dance of man and machine versus gravity.  I look up the road ahead and finally I am able to see the crest of the hill approaching, tanterlisingly close now, I can sense that this hill is conquered, and the feeling spurs me on.  I push harder, dance a little more and I'm there!  The hill is mine at last but there is no time for celebration because now begins the wild exhilaration of racing down the other side.  As I hurtle down, bent low over the frame and handlebars, I sweep around a bend at great speed, and as I do, I let out a great yell, an untamed roar, an expression of freedom and of deviance.  I feel a deeply intense moment of joy and well-being, as my soul soars and my heart flies free. 

In this moment, when I yelled out, I was experiencing a moment of absolute love.  Love of life, love of my path, love of the possibilities, love of myself.  As this wave of love washing over me, I could not help myself.  I felt a strong impulse to shout out, to let the world around me know that I was in a moment of pure and unadulterated happiness.  I was reminded of a couple of lines that Walt Whitman wrote, in his poem entitled, Song of Myself and that feature in the movie, Dead Poets Society:-

"I too am not a bit tamed, I too am untranslatable, I sound my barbaric yawp over the roofs of the world."

I understand you truly Walt.  These are the moments when heart and soul are completely free and unshackled from the physical body.  These are the moments when a primeval sense of pure joy and freedom engulf you, sweep through you.  You transcend the physical and become your true spiritual self.  These feelings do not come from without, they come from within.  They surge through you, an unstoppable force that no one can control.  These feelings are your true soul, you true self, your true power and beauty.  In these moments, you truly become a god.  For in these moments you are the mountain, the river, the lake, the forest, the valley, the ocean, the bird, the fish, the beast, the clouds, the wind, the sun, the moon, and the stars.  In these moments, your spirit returns to the centre of all things, and all things become one thing only.  And that one thing is love.

I had experienced another moment before this, a moment that was the complete opposite.  A moment of incredible deep serenity, peace and calm.  I had spied a rope tied to the bough of a tree, with a large knot on the lower end, just perfect for swinging on.  Grasping the rope in my hands, I stepped backwards, one, two, three paces, then ran and launched myself skywards, pulling my legs up and locking them around the rope in a tight grip.  Whoosh! Back and forth I swung, slowly twisting around one way and then the other.  I lent back, taking the weight of my body against my arms, pushing my legs forward, and I gazed up at the tree top above.  It was mesmerising.  Through the small gaps in the foliage of the leaves, the sun broke through with a shimmering light of radiant brilliance, glittering and sparkling like a million diamonds.  As I swung, so the angle changed and the light appeared to dance, reflecting off the deep green of the leaves.  Here was a beauty that was hard to surpass, here was a miracle of nature playing out above me, here, in this moment, I felt blessed, and I knew I was witnessing a special moment.  An upwelling of joy came to me and I felt such pleasure, lost in that moment, a moment of sun, leaves, bough, rope and me.  I wonder now, as I think back and picture it once more in my mind, whether the sun looked down upon me, and felt the same joy that I felt in that moment, to see a heart that was so full of love.

During this one morning, I beheld two very different experiences, and one thing linked them both.  Through letting go of our conscious thought, we can find moments of intense emotional pleasure.  Moments when we are able to connect to everything that surrounds us.  In these moments, we transcend the physical and we enter the place where our true spiritual self resides.  These are moments when we feel an undeniable connection to everything that surrounds us, a connection with life itself.  When we experience these moments, our hearts journey to the centre of the universe, to the place where time and creation itself began.  And in that place, in the great heart of all things, is found the one thing that connects every other thing and makes all of life possible.  That one thing is love.

The next time that you find yourself in such a situation, in a place where you feel an intense connection to all that surrounds you, when you know that your heart and soul are flying free, do not be afraid, give voice to your own barbaric yawp, share the moment, and shout it out across the roofs of the world.

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Sometimes It Helps To Be A Little Mad

There are times when I am asked about my life, about the changes that I have been through, the places that I have been, the things that I have done.  As I explain the events of my recent past, as I describe my experiences, as I list the countries in which I have visited and lived, as I give the reasons for doing what I have done, I hear my own voice as if it were spoken by another.  I hear the tiny vibrations of air that pass between my lips and form into words, and I wonder if in fact, when it comes down to it, could it be that perhaps I am just a little mad?

How then could I explain my life if it were not otherwise?  A person of rational, sound thought and mind would surely not lead the life that I lead.  To have at one time, known a life of comfort and security, of which so many others can only hope, and to have left it all behind, to strike out into the unknown, with no real sense of where I was going, what I was going to do, and what would happen after I did it.  I disposed of all of my possessions, systematically, machine like, devoid of any emotional connection to them.  I decided that everything, except some small mementoes and sentimental items would have to go.  I saw everything only as a link back to the past that I was trying to leave behind, a knot that bound me to my old life that I needed to sever.  It was as though a madness were upon me, driving me on, telling me that these things had to be done.

It is almost eight years now since I heard myself resigning from my job at IBM.  Those words came out in a moment of madness that, at the time, I thought I might come to regret.  I knew nothing back then of all that was to come, I knew only that I wanted some other path for my life.  If it had not been for my madness, I could not know what it was to scuba dive, I would never have stroked my hand down the side of a tiger shark, I would never have pulled my car up on the side of the road and watched a male lion who stood barely six feet away, I would never know what it was to listen to whale song under the ocean, I would never have met so many incredible, inspiring and amazing people, I would never have seen humpback whales leaping from the ocean, I would have never glided with giant manta rays through the ocean, I would never have turned my hand to writing, I would never have helped those people I have helped, nor inspired those I have inspired, I would never have learned all that I have learned, and I would never have understood that the secret to life was held in a single, simple word called love. 

Without that moment of madness, my life would be different.  I cannot say it would have been better or worse.  I know only that which I know now, which is that since the moment when I resigned, I have never felt a single pang of regret for the life that I left behind.  Perhaps down the other path I would have found my love, my partner and my family?  I will never know.  Would I trade that for all that I has happened to me in these eight years?  Never.  That particular dream is still very much alive and one that will come to fruition when the time is right for me and for her.  That is just the way it needs to be.  

If I am suffering from a touch of madness, then from where could it originate?  As I was sitting up in bed this morning, reading and sipping my morning coffee, my thoughts turning towards my chaotic life, I made a decision to begin to write my thoughts down.  As I commenced the writing of this post, I had a thought that leaped out at me.  Perhaps I was born with the madness in my blood and in my soul.  It was not a thing that I planted and grew, rather, it was already within me, biding it's time, slowly growing its roots and waiting for the right moment to push its head above the soil and show itself to me.  That one single moment of time when it knew I would begin to listen to its voice.  So, if I did not invent the madness for myself, if it was already within me, from whence could it have come? 

From our mother's and our father's comes our blood.  From their parents, so too came theirs and so forth and so forth, back thousands of years to the very dawning of human existence, nay, to the very dawning of life on this planet.  With their blood comes the DNA and genetic code, the building blocks of what creates me, what creates you, of what defines how we will look and how we will think.  Is it possible too, that within the blood that pulses through our veins, that we also carry an accumulation of all of our ancestors hopes, dreams, whims and urges?  Within the blood, could there be a secret essence of life, a purpose that drives us ever on.  Perhaps, that is why we feel our dreams and our emotions so keenly from the heart.  The heart is the centre of  the blood flow, everything goes in and out from there, so naturally, that would be why we hold our dreams and our love within our heart's.  Why could that not be true?  That the blood line of our ancestors must go on, ever evolving, ever reaching out, until we have evolved spiritually and fulfilled our one true destiny, until we have accomplished the goal that was set before us at the dawning of time?  I like this thought.  It brings a smile to my lips and a joy to my heart.  The thought that I am continuing the dreams of my father and my grandfather brings me closer to them in spirit.

Even if the blood theory is wrong, it makes no difference.  We are taught from our parents and they from theirs.  With each passing generation, we are moulded by their learning, by their views of life, by their hopes, their dreams, their failures, their joys, their disappointments and most importantly of all, by their love.  From generation to generation, the accumulation of spiritual evolution is passed and as we, in our turn, carry that flaming torch, it is up to each of us to decide how we will write our own story.  How is it that we will help turn the wheel of spirtual evolution and what is it that we will pass down the line, to those that come after?  In the movie Dead Poets Society, there is a moment where Mr Keating (Robin Williams) recites a poem by Walt Whitman that contains the line, "That the powerful play goes on, and you may contribute a verse."  What will be the verse that I choose to write in the play of life?

We can chose to move the spiritual evolution forward, we can turn the wheel and in doing so, add our own piece to the jigsaw.  Perhaps ours will be the last, perhaps ours will be only a tiny part of a much greater picture, perhaps ours is a magic piece that brings everything together, paving the way for those that will come after.  All that matters is that we do turn the wheel.  I don't see spiritual growth as a choice, I view it more as a duty.  To carry out that duty, we need only listen to the voice from within - the voice of our heart.

There it is.  The heart.  It always comes back to this one single, beautiful, miracle of nature.  The heart speaks with the voice of love and the voice of love originates from the centre of universe, it is the power that holds everything together, it is THE force of the universe, the force of life.  I've written before of being heartstrong and it is true of every single person on this planet.  The only thing that makes a difference between each of us, is whether we chose to act upon the callings and the urges of our heart's. 

When you look into the eyes of a certain person and in your heart a voice calls out, you are presented with a choice: act, or do not act.  It is that simple.  If I choose to act, then I follow my heart's desire, I follow a whim of madness in thinking and believing that this other person who stands in front of me may feel the same quickening of their pulse, the same racing of their blood in their veins, the same flutter of their heart.  It is the same feeling that occurs when you think of your dreams, when you hold a picture of a certain mountain, an ocean, a river, a desert in your mind, or when you picture yourself as a teacher, an artist, a writer, a singer, a chef, or whatever it is that is your heart's desire.  It is love. 

To be heartstrong is to listen to, and to follow your heart.  I am going to add another attribute of what it means to be heartstrong.  To be heartstrong means that you must be mad, since only the mad among us, dare to dream and not only dream, we dare to follow the voice inside of us.  We are the believers, we are the listeners, we are the walkers.  We are filled with love because love is the force, and we smile, we laugh, we do crazy things, because we of the heartstrong are possessed with a madness.  And being mad certainly helps just a little.

~ ~ ~ 

Oh me! Oh Life! by Walt Whitman

Oh me! Oh life! of the questions of these recurring,

Of the endless trains of the faithless, of cities fill’d with the foolish,

Of myself forever reproaching myself, (for who more foolish than I, and who more faithless?)

Of eyes that vainly crave the light, of the objects mean, of the struggle ever renew’d,

Of the poor results of all, of the plodding and sordid crowds I see around me,

Of the empty and useless years of the rest, with the rest me intertwined,

The question, O me! so sad, recurring—What good amid these, O me, O life?

Answer.

That you are here—that life exists and identity,

That the powerful play goes on, and you may contribute a verse.

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