Today, I went back to the mountain to say goodbye. I leave town in a few days and Italy next week to return to the US. It was really cold today. Full sweater, jacket, scarf, and hat were barely enough to stay warm. As always, the mountain required the journey uphill that would replace one discomfort–the cold, with another–the aching calves.
It’s the second time this week that I go back to say goodbye. The mountain has caught my heart and touched my soul in ways it hadn’t since my teens. Of course, the mountain has always been the mountain–always here, it’s me who has changed, who found time for it–all over again.
The mountain makes no compromises. I really do hate uphill hikes and the cold, too–but to be with the mountain, I must. The mountain offers no shortcuts, to my experience of it. All or nothing. And for all those years when the time, the cold, and the uphill hikes were a deterrent–it was nothing.
To have the mountain I must have all of it: pause, cold, peaks, and magic. To get to the magic I must face all the rest. It’s the full experience that makes the whole. How often have I tried to control other’s experience of me, by presenting only the best of me? This without that? the passion but not the intensity, the love, but not the longing, the strength but not the weaknesses, the wisdom but not the sore spots. One of my dear friends says to me: “Rita Fierro–YOU my dear, are an experience!” how do I embrace that full experience by allowing others to see, feel, experience all of me?
Now That I have spent most of my life becoming more of me–how do I bring that forth as unapologetically as possible–and still bring forth all the love I have more humanity, and myself as part of it?