Читать книгу The Ashokan Way - Gail Straub - Страница 12

Just home from a conference and meetings in Washington D.C., I am exhausted, over stimulated, and too full. For me there is only one cure: I need to walk in open space.

Ancient peoples believed that the mountains steadied the earth and held it together. Today as I follow the Ashokan Way, I am certain that the Catskills hold me together. And while the landscape’s solidity holds me, the reservoir’s waves rock me. My brain feels like an overloaded filing cabinet with the extra files spilling out of my head, tumbling behind me in chaotic heaps. Meanwhile, my footsteps speak: Breathe, empty, space. Breathe, empty, space. Breathe, empty, space.

I listen to my footsteps’ counsel and I understand that my challenge is not to eliminate all of the busyness in my life, but rather to empty myself in the midst of the fullness. The I Ching’s fifty-second hexagram is Ken, the mountain majestically moving above and massively still below. The hexagram is described this way; “Ken mountain means coming to rest in motion. When the proper interplay of stillness and action is understood and practiced, the path for progress is bright and glorious.” Observing High Point, I see that the peak surrounded by clouds is moving toward heaven while the immense base is the definition of solid motionlessness, earth itself. I long to pull my living mountain inside me so that I might inhabit its balance of action and stillness, heaven and earth.

Ancient wisdom keepers believed that we could better understand the fundamental principles of life when in the presence of a mountain landscape, and this has been true for me. This outer mountain is always ready to help me find my inner mountain. Each day when I leave my office bound up in details and endless lists of things to do, feeling almost buried alive under a torrent of e-mails, I walk into a place that allows me to be empty. For me, this open space is one of the few forces potent enough to overcome the hungry ghosts of modern technological distraction. The landscape returns me to my own inner search engine, reminding me that this interior inquiry is where the roots of my human condition exist. This land reminds me that a computer can never accomplish my internal quest.

Not only does this mountain valley embody the rest in motion that I need, but also it radically alters my sense of time, space, and self. Out here in the open, I feel and sense and think in a different way. Who cares about the minutiae of today’s ever-so-important To-do lists when I am surrounded by a landscape formed three hundred million years ago, a place where dinosaurs roamed among primordial plants and massive ice flows carved out mountains as a lasting record of their existence? And here I am, strolling through this valley that silently holds all the memories of past, present, and the eventual future. The long body of this place is humbling, putting all my lists of things to do in their proper perspective. Walking inside this ancient lineage, I will soon find my balance of stillness and action.

The further I go along the Ashokan Way, the more I reside within my inner mountain. All the while, like a giant pitcher of light, this bright day pours its sunshine over the valley’s hollows and ridges. It pours and pours its abundant light over me, too. A red-tailed hawk flies just above me, its feathered pattern an intricate mosaic illuminated by the sun. Its strong wings beat away my sense of being overloaded. Higher and higher it soars, way up into all that endless space. My footsteps are nimbler and I feel, for now at least, that I have become the mountain, coming to rest in motion.

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