The past several summers I have been taking other lovers. Every August my husband says goodbye from our home in Seattle, and watches me drive north. I travel across the border into Canada, and then west to Banff National Park, eleven hours and entire world away from the city I usually inhabit. Banff is my soul home, and her vast dogtoothed, sawbacked, castellated, matterhorned mountain ranges are my lovers.
Making relationship with these mountains – Rundle, Cascade, Tunnel, Sulphur, Norquay in town, and the vast ranges that cross the continental divide, and the thrust faults of Yoho and Kootenay Parks, and the Waputik and Wapta icefields, and the glaciers of Peyto, Bow, Vulture, Crowfoot, Hector – has been much like learning to love another human. Anyone who is creative knows that one can be spiritually companioned by a being who is not necessarily human. The lover can be the spider, the tree, the raven, the rock. For me, to be with the mountain is to be ensouled.
To become a lover with a mountain, reciprocity is required. I ask for peace, grandeur, timelessness, perspective and expansion; the mountains expect the same from me. I enter into our union knowing I’ll not urgently scamper to the top in some conquerer’s takeover, but instead gaze at the minutae. I’ll spend time in solitude, watching who this mountain being is. Reciprocity means that I work on behalf of the mountain – her streams, lakes, trails, flowers, boulders, animals – and that I will not disregard the sensibility of creatures whose language and role is different from my own.
I’ve become aware this trip, in a manner unlike any form I have ever known, how much the mountains have to teach me about expansive energy. I no longer end at my skin. Or even at the few feet around me, as I project my strong personality. Instead, in this grand Precambrian force, my sense of “I” is altered. In these wild places my being leaves my known self and moves outward, sometimes for an entire mountain pass, through dense forests and deep gorges, over meadows and montanes, around alpine lakes and glacial rivers, and within that breadth, I become as they. “I am large, I contain multitudes,” said Walt Whitman, and he spoke the lesser known too – “I… am not contained between my hat and boots." Like the poets, the wild can take us beyond a conventional knowing of self, to a transcendental identity. And when such wilderness traverses occur, unlike in the city, amongst noise and pollutants and urgencies, I don’ try to protect my heart or my mind or my body. I reel. In the wonder that is living large, my ‘self’ scatters beyond my cells, blood, organs, brain, and I receive the persistent mystery. “Who am I?” is the question my Zen master assigned as my koan some two decades ago in these Canadian Rockies. How strange that I stand alone and hear these very mountains echo – “All of us.”
On the day that I left Banff, there was new snow on the mountains. The rain clouds lifted revealing granite edges swathed in crystalline powder. Another season, another transformation that I would be absent for. These mountains are the beloved to me, in as tangible and erotic a manner as the dear man to whom I’ve been married for twenty-nine years. This isn’t an amusing metaphor. I have been taken by the mountain lover. We belong to each other. I must return.
