MOUNTAIN VIEW

By LIZA FIELD/Columnist

To Touch and Feel is to Experience. Many people live out their entire lives without ever really Touching or being Touched by anything. These people live within a world of mind that may move them sometimes....but they never really Touch. They do not live and become one with life.

--Hyemeyohsts Storm

When I do not have air and exercise, I get what I call my ‘Mrs. Gummidge mood.’ But it vanishes like a phantom in thin air, when I exercise out of doors, breathe and sweat, and lo! I am free and easy, cheerful and strong.

--Brenda Ueland

Do you still have your edge, this winter? You know—that edge of utter awakeness, of peril, risk, discomfort, and the accompanying gladness-to-be-alive?
John Muir quickened his on steep mountains or climbing giant spruce trees in a thunderstorm or by walking across the country. Diana Nyad found her edge in training to swim great distances across the oceans. Colin Fletcher, in his 70s, sharpened his edge on a solo adventure down the Colorado River.
My mother, also in her 70s, walks out the door in freezing darkness each morning, to climb Mill Mountain. My father the bicycler has also taught himself to swim and now churns 50 laps at a go. But these stories are uncommon.
Many Americans have the continual mental edge-sharpening of deadlines, work challenges, the problem-solving of daily life, the need to stand before others and speak up for a place, a client, a thing one believes or yearns to share. Yet often we lose the physical, invigorating edges that pump blood through our systems and keep us connected to the wild, joyful circuitries of earth.
The late Minnesota writer, Brenda Ueland, who herself walked for hours around Lake Calhoun every day, in zero-degree winters, and often swam across the lake—twice with Robert Penn Warren—wrote of a house-guest, “Colonel Ole Reistad,” former commander of the Royal Norwegian Air Force.
“You could not keep him indoors. He seems to feel happy only out under a rather cold sky. It depressed him that people ‘were like bugs running from box to box.’ ”
Reistad arrived in November, she wrote, when “Lake Calhoun was ‘wolfy’—sharp grey waves like snavelling, slashing fangs of cold teeth biting at the sky.” The next morning when Ueland came downstairs for breakfast, she learned that ‘Colonel Reistad had already run around the lake and then plunged in swimming.’ ”
The man “ate apples and drank milk and nothing could express his continuous astonished scorn that people should be such tomfools and self-enfeebling idiots as to sit indoors and smoke or drink.” Before driving him to give a radio lecture, she found the Colonel outside running laps in a blizzard.
English poet David Whyte talks about his need to keep an “edge” on his lecture tours, when it would be easy to succumb to the insulated padding of airport cocktail lounges, conference centers, 24-hour room service and 200 entertainment channels. “I eat less frequently, try to keep the raw edge of hunger and get out in the weather.”
But it’s not just traveling and excess that dulls our edges today. Within our place and time, particularly in winter, it’s easy on a daily basis to insulate ourselves to the point that no raw edges are left exposed. We feel no wind on the face, hear no February birds or thawing mountain creeks, feel no exhilarating rush of blood walking through miles of chilly, face-whipping air.
“It’s cold!” objected a philosophy student, as we were discussing this phenomenon of our time. I’d asked how many of us had walked outdoors, feet on the ground, face in the sky, within the past week. A handful of people had, most of them living on family farms or keeping stoves supplied with chopped wood. None of us had gone out at night, this past week, to look at the stars or listen to sounds. We were living in our bubbles.
We realized, in fact, that it is possible to live an entire winter without stepping on the earth, seeing the sky, or feeling wind stir on the face. One could exit the home each morning inside a chrome bubble, backing through the garage entrance, get some drive-through coffee, work in a building all day, drive to a fitness center afterward, drive to a restaurant and back home through the mouth of that garage. It was like living inside of an eggshell—comfortable and protected, but somehow cut-off from the Universe.
Irish philosopher John O’Donohue, acknowledging the ancient human need for shelter, also pointed out the deadening effects of our “domestication” today, when adults and even children can live whole weeks and summers indoors with TV, video games and Internet to pipe in replicas of reality.
Living so utterly sheltered, “we learn to forget the wild, magnificent Universe in which we live. When we domesticate our minds and hearts, we reduce our lives. We disinherit ourselves as children of the Universe.”
And thus, we imprison ourselves. “Why do so many of us reduce and domesticate our one journey through this universe? Why do we long for walls to keep us in and keep mystery out? We have a real fear of freedom.”
After seven years-ful of political speeches about the cost of “freedom,” I find O’Donohue’s words very piercing. “In general, everyone is apparently in favor of freedom. We fight for it and praise it. In practice, however, we keep back from freedom. We find it awkward and disturbing. It challenges us to awaken and realize all the possibilities that sleep in the clay of our hearts.”
To wake up is to feel one’s edge. As St. Augustine said, it’s easier to doze. We beg God to let us “sleep a little longer,” not realizing that the discomfort and trouble we so fear in the outer world are the very sharpening tools that exist for our refining, awakening and freedom.
Inside, it’s hard to believe that. But one walk out the door and down the imperfect, thawing, beautiful February road will prove my point.
A writer, educator and community activist, Liza Field lives in Wytheville. Contact her at .