When despair for the world grows in me
and I wake in the night at the least sound
in fear of what my life and my children’s lives may be,
I go and lie down where the wood drake
rests in his beauty on the water, and the great heron feeds.
I come into the peace of wild things
who do not tax their lives with forethought
of grief. I come into the presence of still water.
And I feel above me the day-blind stars
waiting with their light. For a time
I rest in the grace of the world, and am free.
Wendell Berry, “The Peace of the Wild Things”
I. Mein Colorado Bergheim
I was never a kid who loved being outside with a particular fervor. Danny and I played with our neighbors down the street, but I was just as content to be in the basement as I was to be in the yard. Long bike rides with Daddy were cool, but not as cool as the ice cream involved at the end. My neon feelings of childhood summer nights are driving to Dairy Queen with the windows down, late-90s Daddy blasting Dave Matthews or his latest world music find. It’s parking and watching the sun set. It’s sitting on the porch after dinner. It isn’t “being out in nature.”
There was a large green belt behind our neighborhood growing up, and I biked down there with Danny or by myself and picked through the weeds in the dry creek bed. I designated a copse of trees to be my castle, and put two sticks up in a cross to claim it. I took books there to lie in the grass and read. One day I found a beer can and followed the trash to a beat up couch stuffed under a bunch of brush — clearly, I was not the only person using this space.
The thing about Colorado is that it is always sunny and dry, so being outside just happens. It isn’t planned. It isn’t packed for. Denver is not humid, and it rains for ten minutes in the afternoon. I grew up utterly spoiled with *perfect* weather. At this point, the cute Western town-ness of Denver has been fully bulldozed by bleary-eyed, bearded tech bros from the Midwest who have moved there in an unrelenting wave over the past fifteen years. (I am throwing multiple exes under the bus, here. Yes.) But it’s because the weather is just so damn good. I had no idea that the rest of the world wasn’t like this until I went to college in northern Indiana and developed Seasonal Affective Disorder.
Growing up in the south of Denver, went on family bike rides through the trails of Highlands Ranch. We drove up to Bear Lake in Rocky Mountain National Park. We swam in Chatfield reservoir once a week during the summer. We went to the top of Mount Evans. But, truth be told… we grew up a beach family. Not a hiking family. My mom was from Santa Monica, and my dad was born in Norfolk and went to high school in Coronado. We spent far more money on good snorkel gear than good hiking boots. Are the Rocky Mountains indelibly imprinted on my brain like a homing device? Yes. Do I get anxiety when I’m in flat places? Always. But hiking, before now, was a novelty, and not a necessity.
My love of hiking has been cultivated as an adult. I’ve done far more of it as I’ve grown older. And then came this year: Living Along in Vienna During a Seven Month Lockdown.
II. Mein Tempo finden
I am a slow walker. In college, I always left ten minutes before my roommate to get to the same building, because I like to amble. I am routinely bypassed on city streets. I don’t mind. I decided in college that I’d rather take longer to get somewhere than be uncomfortable doing it. (I hold an inverse belief for driving, but that’s a topic for another time.)
The gift of solo hiking is that I am not 1) attempting to impress a male with my sweet hiking skillz 2) trying to keep my pride intact alongside friends who are sportier than I, or 3) keeping up with other humans at all. It’s total pace freedom. I didn’t realize what an impact my company and pride had upon my pace until I was popping along a few meters behind an old couple for about a mile and very happy, thank you. I am perfectly content to wander along at the pace of an eighty year old woman out for a stroll. I frequently stop to look at flowers and take photos. I imagine someone passing me on the trail gets the impression of Winnie the Pooh, zig-zagging across the path to put his nose in honey pots, or in my case, wonder if maybe this one is edelweiss. (It never is.)
The delight of being a party of one is so freeing that I feel foolish for having not realized it until my thirties. I’ve seen plenty of friends and elders go about trails on their own, but I figured it was because they were introverts, and how boring. What I didn’t understand is that a trail sought out alone is a choose-your-own-adventure with the bumper rails up. Here’s a trail, here’s the map, eat when you want, pee where you want, stop when you feel like it, lie down and daydream, take fifteen photos of that tree, double back to smell that flower. It is a literal playground, utterly removed from urgency or expectation. My phone loses service and becomes solely a camera. I have a sweater in my bag and a tank top under my shirt. I have a package of cheese and two bottles of water. I am ready for anything.
III. Die lebenswerteste Stadt der Welt
Vienna is The Most Livable City in the World, something which they don’t really let you forget. My annual public transit pass is a dollar a day. Waiting more than five minutes for a bus or U-Bahn means there’s a backup. There is poverty and a large refugee community, but virtually no homelessness.
And we are surrounded by woods.
The Vienna Woods are a creature of myth. Through them traveled Beethoven, Mozart, Schubert and Strauss. The Romantic Era is captured by the Wanderer looking longingly out over the sea, but he could just as easily have been looking out over the woods that have been painted so many times. The first few times I crested into a burst of sunshine and valleys and saw them stretching in all directions without being broken up by human buildings, I thought, my goodness, they do look different from other woods! They do look like all of those paintings in the Kunsthistorisches Museum! There is a distinct haze that gives them a brighter green and a huskier red, and a bushiness that makes a copse of trees look like they’ve been bunched that way for centuries. (Which they probably have.)
It’s a well known Colorado fact that the Rocky Mountains are “young,” a mere 50 million years old, as opposed to their siblings, the Appalachian Mountains, which were formed 500 million years ago. I am gonna wager a guess that the geographic movements of Austria are akin to the Appalachians, because the woods here just feel so different from the red trunks and vanilla pines of the Rockies.
IV. Der Segen der Höhe
I do not like to talk to my mom. She is dead, and when I talk to her like she’s in the air, that just confirms her deadness. I don’t like it. It makes me angry. Whenever I say, “I wish I could tell Mommy…” my dad tells me, “You can! She’d love to hear! I talked to her about you this morning!” But, no. I can’t. It feels like admitting defeat. If I allow her into the space of an imaginary friend, I’m giving in. It means I can’t call her on the phone. It means I’ve accepted that she’s not going to be on the couch when I get home. Trash. TRASH.
When I am in the woods, and walking for hours, the pit of anxiety and anger in my gut loosens. About two hours in, I finally feel free, natural, like I’m a part of my surroundings and not constantly warring with reality. It’s as if the removal of human things allows me to be primal in the sense that I’ve returned to the first things, the natural world, the Eden. The sky is fuller. The air is richer. The wild garlic balloons over the entire forest floor, creating a carpet of neon. I am a self-sufficient little blip in this space, sitting inside of it, anonymous and known, because I, like the trees and the garlic, am alive.
Perhaps I’m a dum-dum for not realizing this until my thirties. But I really do think the solitude of it, which I’m now well-trained in, is essential. I spend twenty three hours a day alone in my flat. I am now well accustomed to my own company, weaving my grief around online teaching appointments and Soul Singing courses. This is not a life I have ever led before. I don’t think I’d be so moved by the woods, or have such deep cracks to fill, if I were not this woman in this place at this time.
When I am up there, in the Höhe (altitude), I feel like I am close to God. I feel like the Creator is pulsing all around me, and that I am as we were meant to be. The longing/sehnsucht is fulfilled. I am nothing, I am with everything. The only movements that matter are the big ones. What I mean to say is, I do not grieve, because I feel I am existing quietly in a scope that allows for beauty to come and go. A thousand flowers and trees and birds have lived and died in this space, and the beauty renews, and points to the benevolence of the Creator. The design holds. My mother has gone, and I will, too. Life seems less intimidating because it seems less long, and the next phase more real.
V. Kleine Holzschilder, ich liebe dich
This is a high I have started to chase with intention. It’s Saturday morning. I wake up, grab my food and a book for the bus, put on my shoes, and go. Vienna has eleven official City Hiking Trails, which start in the city and lead into the surrounding hills and back again. I’ve done seven.
First comes the adventure of getting to the trailhead, which usually takes an hour and involves two trains and a bus. Once I get to the little dot on the map, I begin the game of finding The Next Wooden Sign. Some trails are well marked. Some are a mess, and twice I ended up popping out of the thicket into a random neighborhood, looking for any sort of bus stop. Then I wiggle my way home, because all roads lead to a train station, and tumble exhausted into the shower. I don’t move much on Sundays.
VI. In meinem Körper sein, allein sein
There are two things I’ve thought about a lot since I’ve started seeking out the high of a Höhe hit: being in my body, and being alone.
When I am hiking, I do not care what I look like. I am dressed for no one. I don’t have to suck in my stomach passing a reflective store window. I don’t have to angle my bag when I sit so it covers my stomach pudge. I can just fucking be. I’m currently doing the daily work of reframing my body in my mind not as a litmus of future attractiveness, but as a tool for living. I spend a lot of time these days thinking about whether or not what I want to wear is different from what makes me look good. I’m working on courage. I think I’m able to do this because I hold such reverence for the woman at the top of the mountain, and if giving-zero-fucks body love is something she has, I’m bringing that back down the mountain with me.
Esther Perel has this great line I think about often these days: Inhabit solitude. To me, this means try not to fight it, don’t resent it, and don’t artificially fill it. Am I naturally good at this? No. For me, inhabiting solitude is a practice that requires work. But like playing an instrument or a sport, just showing up to practice (aka, my current life) every day is moving me towards the goal of proficiency. I’m not great at inhabiting solitude, but after five months of being alone in my flat all day, I’m getting far more proficient at it. I think this (unchosen, situational) work made it possible for me to experience the woods the way I do.
VII. Die Eucharistie im Wienerwald
Of this I am sure: it is a Eucharistic journey. In a world in which attending mass is patently discouraged by local authorities, being close to the earth and clouds puts me in a wider, communal view of things that is akin to the reception of the Eucharist. It’s obviously not a replacement, but it is an arrow, pointing to the gift of that Sacrament. It remains sacramental in nature, because this overwhelming, chest filling sense of beauty and the Primary Mover not only inspires gratitude, but a deep conviction that this world is, indeed, worth dying for. Which means it must be worth living for. Which means it must be worth it, even if both Christ and Mommy are dead, and I can only confirm the (believed) Resurrection of one of them. Up here is where I find hope that she’ll make it over that line, too. She’ll make it into glory. She’ll make it home.
When I’m in the woods, I get a glimpse of that place. I walk along the edge. I stand in the thin space, and if I squint at the right moment, I can almost see her.
And then I know I’m not alone.
This was so lovely and makes me wish I was hiking in Vienna too <3