Experiences That Chase Away Worry
A Postponed Dream Leads to a Discovery
My vacation plans are slammed two years in a row. Minor setbacks in the overall scheme of things, these plans represent more than just a delayed vacation. Rick and I arrange a trip with friends in Sprinter vans through Yellowstone and Glacier Parks the summer of 2019. It’s a dream, a milestone celebration of connection with friends and the land where animals are not squeezed out by urban sprawl. Big Sky country’s elk, antelope, fox, wolf, bear, eagle, osprey, trout, rivers, smells, and landscapes bring me back to a lost era. I want to linger in the Lamar Valley, the Serengeti of North America, to spy furtive forest creatures emerge in the long northern dusk, to hike the vanishing glaciers while there is still time, even to boondock in a smartly equipped van. Everything is planned and paid for; the excitement mounts, and then my cancer returns after 17 years. My life is derailed. One year later, poised to seize the postponed dream, the virus hits. Our dreams are deferred, but our hearts aren’t sick because, between these two events, an unexpected gift drops in our lap.
This gift is more than an experience; it is an unearthing. Between my second and third chemo treatments in July 2019, my friend Tracey invites us to stay in her remote Montana mountain retreat. The effects of chemo have set in, but I decide it’s a welcome respite. As our plane shakily approaches the landing in Bozeman’s mountain-ringed airport, a wide line of gray storms drops afternoon loads in the west. The partially obscured sun throws a blueish-green blanket on the mountains and meadows below. The downpour of olfactory delight, with hints of grass and grain, greets us at the terminal. The luggage is delayed by lightning on the runway. We leave the airport to enter Big Sky country—the sky moving, playing, dancing—with weather events flashing, like Las Vegas marquis.
We head to Tracey’s house on Bridger Canyon, which always brings me back to Switzerland’s mountains, meadows, streams, and cows. At the top of her driveway, Ross Peak crowns the view triumphantly. This is why they chose the property! Inside the lodge-like great room with a sense of place, furnished with generous timber, wood, and stone, the eye is pulled to a wide view of Sacajawea and Ross Peaks connected by miles of lush forests. The wind roams through the trees pushing a forest fragrance inside, and I am at peace with the prospect of spending a week in this soulful place. I feel connected to the lively solitude of this land.
In the morning we search for huckleberries, the iconic little fruit of the Northwest. We stuff bags into our pockets at the last minute. Not far from the house in the woods, we spot delicate bushes sprinkled with fruit and begin to pick and sample. As we trail away down a bear path with Timber, Tracey’s German Shepherd, to watch for us, we stumble on a large patch of deep purple huckleberry bushes laden with fruit. Their sheer amount requires us to sit on the ground to pick them. Like happy children unconcerned about the wet ground, we contentedly immerse ourselves in our task, stuffing our bags and mouths. Plump bags full of these wild delights is our reward. As we return to the house, we joke about beating the bears to the berries and leaving some behind for them. The fruit that tastes like blueberries with a tartness of currants and wild forest makes delicious pancakes the next morning.
That next day a visitor arrives on the bear path, a large cinnamon black bear lumbering up with its snout in full operational mode, sucking up thousands of leftover huckleberries, like an industrial vacuum cleaner. Squealing with delight, we jump to the window to watch this fearsome creature from a safe distance. The next day, the bushes are completely stripped of fruit. Feelings of awe mixed with enchantment rouse us.
The gift of huckleberries—and a bear sighting—is more than the experience itself, it’s an unearthing, a discovery more than a pursuit. It’s a clean, unfiltered, and natural immersion in the moment—the feeling of enchanted freedom—that chases away worry. When you boldly announce, “The future doesn’t matter!” you’ve unearthed a gem. Maybe this is what “unless you become like a child” means? You tap into the wild and carefree default position of a child’s heart, which lives closer to the present than the past or future. Like a child, you are pulled by the centripetal force of delight into small moments. The child does not measure out its energy, but it plays until it plops. It revels in a moment of delight. This gift is incorruptible and portable.
Transporting this gift to the present requires intention, not being distracted by the artificial, loud, and urgent that siphon away so much of our time and energy. Distractions from the outside and from within ourselves derail most of us, even seasoned solitude-seekers and creatives like author and poet Mary Oliver:
“It is a silver morning like any other. I am at my desk. Then the phone rings, or someone raps at the door. I am deep in the machinery of my wits. Reluctantly I rise, I answer the phone, or I open the door. And the thought which I had in hand, or almost in hand, is gone. Creative work needs solitude. It needs concentration, without interruptions. It needs the whole sky to fly in, and no eye watching until it comes to that certainty which it aspires to but does not necessarily have at once. Privacy, then. A place apart — to pace, to chew pencils, to scribble and erase and scribble again” (23).
Like creativity, enjoying the moment is interrupted by distractions. We often think of distractions as intruders from the outside like demands of the clock that “is fettered to a thousand notions of obligation”—call the dentist, finish the report, buy mustard, remember mom’s birthday—but the most perilous distraction comes from within us, from “the intimate interrupter,” “the watchful eye we cast upon ourselves” (30) which avoids solitude and concentration. Oliver contends that creativity and art rarely come among crowds and busy places, but in nature or quiet spaces, in swaths of time impervious to interruptions.
Ruthless elimination of distractions creates the conditions to access this gift again. I take time to remember, sift, and mine the meaning of a past joy. I do more than simply call it to mind; I taste and savor it with my senses and heart—sensitive and attached to it—until its essence emerges, until I know what it means to me. Writing conducts me there. Others find it through prayer and meditation. Whatever the means, I find the purest and most real enchantments with a sober mind and open heart. The apex of “Huckleberry Hill” is the affirmation that the future is unimportant. It’s the enchantment of a present moment chasing away future worry, those fleeting experiences of eternity in the now where truth abides. Isn’t this a universal craving?
I want to discover more “Huckleberry Hill” moments where the future doesn’t matter. Will I overcome the ennui of a pandemic to transport this gift to 2020’s staycation?
Work Cited:
Oliver, Mary. Upstream. Penguin Books, 2016.
Next week’s post further explores Oliver’s “intimate interrupter” and “watchful eye” and how to avoid the profound regret they cause. If you’d like to receive new posts, please subscribe on the bottom of the home page.