Love is witnessing a friend in all her glorious quirks and (mostly) not flinching.
I’ve been dancing the waltz of friendship with Mary for nearly two decades now. Our dance floor has spanned mountain ranges, crossed state lines and whizzed through not enough phone lines and text screens. We’ve stood witness to each other as we’ve navigated the struggles and triumphs of our children, the break ups and make ups and final farewells of romantic relationships, the realization of some long-held dreams and the loss of others, the managing of cancers; the welcoming of dogs; the consumption of many bottles of wine.
Right now, we stand together on the cliff of “the third half” of our lives waiting for the next set of wings to sprout from our backs and the strong wind of past-mid-life wisdom to thrust us in the right direction.
Mary accepts my being a soft-talker (yes, exactly like the Seinfeld episode). She is nonplussed by my reserved nature among people I don’t know well and she puts up with my increasing limiting phone phobia, even while she pushes back reminding me that friendships rely on communication. She’s assured me none of my quirks are deal breakers, that our friendship is for life, but still I’ve tried to keep my REAL neurosis under wraps.
Until now. Because hiding the real dirt is just not possible when you share generally very small rooms with someone for 21 days.
Even so, these days with Mary have cemented a truth for me: real and lasting connection is written in the language of acceptance. One the first day of our trip, when I shoved her suitcase into the bathroom and mine under the bed in an almost maniacal attempt to keep the Airbnb clean and uncluttered, she just raised her eyebrows and hid her toiletries. Last night, not quite a week into room sharing, she simply patted me on the back with a knowing chuckle and tucked her suitcase next to the toilet. I interpreted this unspoken gesture as: “I see you and I accept you no matter what.”
In this first week, I’ve shown Mary just how deep my introversion runs. It’s become clear to her that I REALLY don’t understand why or how people eat lunch on a daily basis. She now knows I don’t take a shower more than once or twice a week, that I have a less than forthcoming gastrointestinal system and that I get physically flappy and sometimes repetitive and rageful when plans change.
Conversely, I now know that Mary brings her passion for humans and environmental justice everywhere she goes and not just her beloved Methow Valley. No matter that I sometimes just want to contemplate butterflies and whirlybirds and forget about the terrible injustices of the world. I know that Mary too revels in the awe inspiring beauty she walks in but at the same time feels the pain of earth and spirits of the ancestors and needs to acknowledge and thereby honor them regularly, even on vacation. She says it is part of the balancing act between grief and gratitude. I know she needs to eat regularly or she gets downright hangry and emotional. And just like she does with my isms, all I have to do is pat her on the back, acknowledge her empathic ways and get food into her as fast as humanly possible. I hope she interprets my actions the same way I do hers: “I see you and I accept you no matter what.” Granted, Mary’s need for fuel is actually biologically driven. I am just a weirdo.
The point being, there’s nothing like traveling together to force you to rip down your walls and be seen. And there’s nothing better than finding a true friend standing on the other side when those walls crash down.
So, after dragging our bags out of our bathroom again, re-organizing them for the umpteenth time due to mysterious expansion, downing another cholesterol spiking “full Scottish” breakfast, we hit the trail leading us from Balmaha toward Rowardenen. That is, after we laid our bets on how many times we’d run into the two gentlemen we’ve been passing or following for the past few days as well as the couple we’ve been trying to avoid without admitting it.
(An aside: We’ve built a whole story around the gentlemen walkers. In our story, they are country-crossed lovers (one German, one English) who have come to Scotland to rekindle the glow and this path in particular to challenge the heart. We’ve added colors, popped in a few B-narratives to flesh out the script. And we’ve taken to waving and stopping to chat with them at each path crossing or when we see them in a pub. For the sake of privacy, I’ll call them Harold and Goethe. The other couple is sweet and kind and yet give me the willies for reasons I can’t really put my finger on. Mary is far more gracious in her storyboarding for them. Put your scales away. Everyone makes up stories about strangers!
But I digress. More on meeting fellow walkers in a later post.
The walk itself, mostly alongside the shores of the 24-mile-long Loch Lomond, was gentle and lush and ever “undulating” (a descriptor trail books and trip advisers looooooove to use for the West Highland Way). Despite knowing the definition of undulation, the word always reminds me of body parts (uvula) and, weirdly, sex. So every time Mary says it I burst out laughing. We are now on the hunt for the Most Undulating portion of this wild walk.
For her quiet, mostly solo stroll today, Mary immersed herself in the absolutely perfect Imbolc playlist that her daughter Celeste created for her birthday (which we celebrated just a few days ago). Imbolc is the traditional Gaelic festival that marks the beginning of spring. As I moved along the path, I realized I found myself caught up by the diverse network of families surrounding me: a birch grove here, an ash stand there, an oak grouping to the left east to west, alder, rowan, hazel groves right, north to south.
More and more these days, I feel a desire to connect with trees. I’ve had dreams of being wrapped in their roots, a strange and inviting Madonna and child. In others, I see myself buried in those roots, transforming to soil, then rising resurrected in root and trunk and leaf. I find myself needing to lay my hands gently on treeing, feeling the strength of their quiet presence, listening to their breathing. Along with the birdsong, I found myself part of quite a symphony today.
And yet, even amid all that undulating connection, I felt frustration and sadness at the mindless things people do. At one point, I sat down on a rock and wrote note to the hikers who seem to think it’s perfectly ok to leave protein bar wrappers and poopy toilet paper directly on the path, unpocketed after consumption or unburied and in clear site everyone:
“Dear Trail Poopers,
Ever heard of the Bothy Code (also the Scottish Outdoor Access Code)? These codes carry the basic rules of etiquette for hiking, camping and other interactions with nature in Scotland (and, honestly, should be the universal rule everywhere). Key among the guidelines:
Pack it in, pack it out. In other words, don’t pollute.
Human waste should be buried carefully out of sight.
We have so few places left to wrap ourselves in nature, can you just please stop ruining them?
Love, Cheryl”
Not wanting to litter, I tucked the note in my backpack and instead I sent my message out from my hear to broader humanity: Have mercy on this planet.
Just like hotels, restaurants and other service providers around the world, the bed and breakfasts, pubs and shops along the West Highland Way are all understaffed. The staff that are present are overworked. Part of this is pandemic recovery. But mostly it's a result of Brexit, which has limited the ability of the hospitality industry here to hire workers from Europe. It’s been eye-opening to hear the Brexit story from these workers and proprietors. The workers who served us dinner at 7 p.m. and were still proffering pints to weary walkers at 10 p.m. were there at 6 a.m. with breakfast plates in hand. Mary and I are humbled by their hard work and we hope that our expressions of gratitude and appreciation today felt like some small kindness amidst the pressure.
I should add that Mary’s setting the intention for happy accidents gave us a nod today. The hotel registration told us to have our bags down to be transported forward at 9 a.m. At 8:20 a.m. an invisible nudge sent me up to our room to get something, at which point a hotel staffer knocked on the door and warned me the transport was reading to leave and we needed to get our bags down ASAP.
It goes without saying that it would have been a MUCH longer, harder trek with rolling suitcases and a second backpack!
Today thankfulness filled my walking and my being – for the beauty of these days, for the hospitality we’ve been shown, and more than anything, for a friendship grounded in acceptance, sometimes laced with a chuckle, always filled with compassion.
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