On the first Saturday in May I went with two friends for a hike on Catoctin Mountain, the easternmost ridge of the Blue Ridge Mountains, which are part of the Appalachian Range. Catoctin Mountain is about an hour’s drive northwest of my home in Maryland. I’d been there many times before, hiking with friends and family, nervously watching my young son scramble over the rocks at Cunningham Falls, and exploring trails to craggy outcrops with sweeping views of the Monocacy Valley. Catoctin’s variegated seasonal raiment has elevated my spirit and refined my appreciation for the unique beauty of deciduous forests.

Still, I had a reasonable excuse to decline my friends’ invitation to hike to Wolf Rock on that spring afternoon. In the last year my dual plagues of chronic pain and fatigue have worsened considerably, keeping me virtually under house arrest most evenings and weekends, puttering through personal and home maintenance chores and trying to conserve energy for the coming work week. Breaking from this routine is a calculated risk. I can end up paying for my fun with a spike in pain and fatigue that can lay me low for a day or two. I thought long and hard about the potential physical price of a long hike over steep, rocky trails, then considered the psychic price of wimping out and hoarding my energy for—what?—more yard work? What about my commitment to live mindfully in the moment? No, I finally decided, this hike would not be good for my body, but I am more than my body. My spirit needs caring for too. It needs to be fed by the sight of new and beautiful things and the companionship of people who are always glad to see me. In the end, I reckoned it was kind of like having a baby. A few weeks after labor and delivery the hideous pain recedes from conscious memory and the trauma is shrouded in a rosy glow. Also like labor, there’s always the option of medication.

* * *

Not far from the sprawling Washington suburbs, you start to get an uninterrupted view of the undulating folds of the eastern Blue Ridge. I grew up in California, not far from the soaring granite peaks and cliffs of the Sierra Nevada. Visitors from out West often get a kick out of maligning our venerable Blue Ridge. “You call those mountains?” they scoff. “Back home those itty bitty bumps would be foothills!” These are people for whom everything is a contest, as though the Blue Ridge are aspirationally challenged, shamefully lacking in can-do American spirit. We in the reality-based community appreciate that the Appalachian ranges were thrust up from ancient sea beds hundreds of millions of years ago, when the Sierra Nevada was still a pool of gurgling magma beneath the Earth’s crust. That huge head start on erosion accounts for the Blue Ridge being less grand and imposing than their western counterparts. Like many of my best friends, age has given them rounder, friendlier proportions and veiled them in the soft-focus haze so flattering to elderly features.

* * *

In the hours I was with my friends, I talked and laughed until my face muscles ached. They don’t get as much practice as they used to, not because my life is gloomy, but because I live alone and my work as an editor is very solitary. Depending on my work load and whether my office mate is in one of her moods, I can go whole days without uttering a single word. These days, my normal speaking voice is often muffled by a dry rasp, as though my larynx were swaddled in a scratchy sweater. It’s been disconcerting to hear the dulcet singing voice that once defined me take on the timbre of a rusty bicycle bell, so it felt good to release peals of unself-conscious laughter in the expansive, forgiving forest.

* * *

We took our time hiking up to Wolf Rock, an upheaval of quartzite that stretches for hundreds of feet along the edge of a vertiginous cliff. The rock is streaked with pink and white quartz and riven by long clefts narrow enough to leap over but deep enough to make you think better of it. Hardy pine trees and spirea bushes have defied innumerable odds to take root in  mere spoonfuls of soil wedged into hairline fissures, reminding you of the sheer insistence of life left unmolested. Wolf Rock… That very morning I’d rushed to switch off the radio when a story began airing about the gray wolf being taken off the Endangered Species List. The thought of some “sportsman” leaning out the side of a hovering helicopter to capture one of these totemic creatures in his crosshairs made me choke on my Wheat Chex.

* * *

As we hiked the trail, I instinctively bent to uproot stalks of garlic mustard. This fragrant plant’s heart-shaped leaves and clusters of delicate white flowers mask its true identity as a cunning, invasive alien that poses a severe threat to native plants and forest habitats throughout the eastern states. Those who live near wooded areas, as I do, are on the alert from May to July to eradicate any new growth. Truth is, I’ve been on auto-kill for all manner of weeds for weeks now. The little sign in my front yard designating my property as a Certified Wildlife Habitat is a source of great pride, but it means that I can’t use herbicides in an area that seems to be Party Central for all manner of malignant weeds. So spring and summer find me on my knees plucking wild violet, wild plantain, wild strawberry, spurge, dandelions, creeping Charlie, and hordes of unnamed invaders one by one, by hand. I think of it as herbal meditation.

As we walked along, I confessed to my friends that for several days after the President announced the killing of Osama bin Laden, I’d had a hard time sorting out my reactions. My gut feeling that Navy SEALs are the coolest guys ever had been confirmed, and I was relieved that the threat posed by bin Laden’s very existence had been eliminated, at least for a while. I appreciate the central role of justice in civil society, and I can’t think of a suitable alternate scenario for dealing with the ultimate terrorist. Yet I found that I could not rejoice in Osama’s death as others seemed eager to do, and this discordance was disturbing to me. I like facts and feelings to be orderly and classifiable, amenable to filing away in noncontradictory cubby holes. If this can’t be achieved, I at least want opposing ideas to stop flinging crockery at each other inside my head.

To quiet things down, I’d gone outside for some after-dinner herbal meditation. On my knees, bent over the mixed greens posing as a lawn, my mind opened to a solution—a way to find resolution for the calculated killing of a living being. I decided that Osama was a weed. Like every living thing, he had been imbued with the same Life Force pulsing through my veins and bursting from every leaf and blade of grass. But like the foreign invaders I was diligently plucking up by their roots for the greater good, Osama simply had to go. 

* * *

At the summit of Wolf Rock we stood catching our breath and taking in the view. The only sound was the breeze stirred by warm drafts rising from the valley below. A friend commented that there’s nothing like the sound of wind in the trees, reminding me of my favorite book, The Wind in the Willows, by Kenneth Grahame, and also of a persistent memory. For the longest time I’ve had recurring visitations of a particular memory. The last mental image that haunted me like this was a scene in the kitchen of my childhood home: I am alone (a rare occurrence in those days), sitting with my back to the radiator on an autumn afternoon, painting with watercolors. I couldn’t understand why this image kept forcing its attentions on me until I finally saw the meaning of the image as a whole—that privacy and solitude are essential to my well-being, and that I need creative projects to channel my energies. It was a memory of a few moments when all the factors necessary for my peace of mind were in play, and it was coming back over and over again to help me find ways to replicate that sense of ease and fulfillment in the present.

Then this new memory began knocking at my frontal lobes, almost always in the evening as I’m drowsily reading or listening to music: I’m ten years old, on a day trip with my family to a California state park called Big Trees, an area of protected redwoods and giant sequoias. After a picnic lunch, my father leads us on a long walk along the forest paths. I close my eyes and smell the mixed aromas of tree bark, dust, pine needles, and sunshine. As the park’s name suggests, the trees are of mammoth proportions. An old stump from the days when logging was still allowed used to accommodate square dances. But as much as this outing stands out as a peaceful interval in a turbulent childhood, it’s the trees themselves, not my family, that are the yearning heart of this memory.

For a long time I tried to decode this visitation, as I’d done with the scene from my mother’s kitchen, but I kept coming up empty. Finally, when it leapt into mental view yet again one evening, I closed the book I was reading and thought, “It’s the trees, Stupid. They want to be with you. Stop trying to interpret them and just listen to them, breathe them, let them surround you right here where you are. The soaring, whispering trees have come to comfort you and give you a message, so just be present and let them do the talking.” And that’s what I do now whenever the Big Trees come calling. Just thank them for coming, close my eyes, and meditate within their magical circle.

* * *

It was nearing dusk, and we were hiking back down the trail when I had my “Aha!” moment. The low sun, just above eye level now, was sending dusty fingers of light through openings in the canopy of young beech leaves shimmering in ephemeral spring green. I squinted into the radiance and thought, “This is it. This is what I will carry with me long after the pain subsides.”

I recalled at that moment the cranky old preacher who holds court at the far right fringe of the radio dial, thundering his conviction that the Rapture will arrive and the world will come under the final wrath of God on May 21, 2011—just weeks away. I’ve listened to this doomsayer off and on for the past two years, morbidly fascinated by his prophecies of death and destruction. He must be thrilled at the prospect of being among the elect who will reign with God for eternity, but you wouldn’t know it from listening to him. Instead, his message can be summed up as, “Na na na-nyah na!” He can’t wait to be a spectator to the annihilation of a world he sees as an abomination, whose evil is embodied in churches that tolerate praise singing and divorced people, in the “gay pride movement,” and in young Arabs with the temerity to rise up against their divinely ordained tyrants. He hates this world and everything about it.

I was raised in a culture that inculcated me with the biblical admonition to “love not the world, neither the things that are in the world.” But I was never able to pull it off, so I renounced that culture instead. Even during my worst bouts of depression I knew the fuel was animus toward myself, not the world. And since I’ve been on a spiritual path of mindfulness and gratitude, my love for the world has grown fierce and protective. It’s not that I don’t acknowledge evil and ugliness in the operations of Nature and human nature, but that I choose every day to, as Joseph Campbell says, “let the world be as it is and learn to rock with the waves,” to find the radiance amid the filth and simply rejoice. Standing in a shaft of dying light in a new spring forest, I embraced the world again with my whole heart, certain that I’d rather go down with the mothership than spend an eternity thumbing my nose at it.