A Place of Refuge

It is no secret I am what you could call obsessed with a nearly 1,200 square mile area of the Sierra Nevada called Yosemite National Park. I was telling someone the other day about my summer vacation plans, and the plans all revolved around this one place. The response? “You must really like Yosemite”! Um…yes, I really like Yosemite.

While other babies spend their 1^st birthdays in a nice clean house with parents that let them go head first into a cake, I spent my first birthday crawling around a Yosemite Valley campground eating dirt and chasing squirrels. (Actually the squirrels tried to steal my food and crawl on me much to my father’s irritation). While other people spend their 21^st birthday bar hopping and getting smashed, I spent mine on top of Half-Dome eating hostess cupcakes for birthday cake. Many of my life events were spent in Yosemite.

I think everyone has a place. A place where the world and all its problems are far away. A place where you can take inventory of your life, and realize that you are truly just a small part of a huge universe. A place for perspective. A place to dust off the weariness that day to day life brings. Mine is Yosemite. This is not to say Yosemite is safe. In fact, I think that is part of its appeal to me. It is an unforgiving wilderness. Don’t let the Ahwahnee Hotel fool you. People get swept down waterfalls and fall off granite cliffs on a fairly regular basis. Nature demands respect that our soft pampered lifestyles do not understand.

Somehow we think that we must defeat anything remotely uncomfortable. This is not a new idea to us homo sapiens. Thank goodness for people like John Muir who dedicated his life to preserve wilderness in a culture that wanted to destroy it. We have come a long way from the days with regularly scheduled bear feedings for the public to watch. The philosophy was to either tame or obliterate nature for our pleasure. Many wanted to turn Yosemite Valley into something akin to an amusement park...some still do. Even worse are those who want to turn parts of the National Park into a dam to send water to San Francisco! Oh wait…they did that. Can you say Hetch Hetchy?  

For those of you who have never been backpacking, let me describe it for you. After you have been on the trail for 3 days, you are stiff, dirty, and tired. You smell like bug spray, sunscreen, and body odor. Your skin is covered in layer upon layer of dirt that has been ground into your pores. Your hair is oily and sticking to your scalp. You are ravenous for a hot meal of carbohydrates and protein. You can’t wait to shower, scrub down, and slip between the clean crisp sheets of a soft bed to sleep for at least 14 hours. How does this sound appealing?

Because you climbed waterfalls. You braved sheer rock cliffs. You slept on untarnished ground. Instead of fighting nature, you became part of it. You discover a world that exists without you controlling it. A world bigger then yourself.  At the end of your adventure, you feel at your very core satisfied. You feel alive.

John Muir said, “Everybody needs beauty as well as bread, places to play in and pray in, where nature may heal and give strength to body and soul”.

 
I fully understand that a good tromp into nature is not everyone idea of a good time. I was born and raised in the forest, so being around rocks, trees, and dirt is second nature. I feel very claustrophobic in the city. Trapped. Everyone has different comfort zones, and mine is NOT surrounded by concrete, noise, asphalt, and buildings.

In fact, I ask a favor of you. Tread carefully, respectfully, and, if nature isn’t your thing, stay out. People die in Yosemite every year because they do not respect or understand the wilderness they have entered. If you do visit, stay on marked trails and read signs. Don’t swim above a waterfall. Stay behind retaining walls even if you think you could get “the perfect picture” by climbing over it. Obey the rangers and use them as a resource. Know your limits. Still not your thing? Six Flags is great this time of year!

I don’t know of any words that really express how I feel when I am in Yosemite Valley. There is something about being surrounded by granite cliffs and waterfalls that is calming. Reassuring.  Energizing. Addicting. There is something unique about the Yosemite wilderness that is unlike any other. It is the one place on the face of the planet that when I am there, I don’t want to be anywhere else.

 John Muir summed it up best when he said “Yosemite Park is a place of rest, a refuge from the roar and dust and weary, nervous, wasting work of the lowlands…”

Exactly.

One Life to Live

      Anyone who says they have only one life to live must not know how to read a book.  ~Author Unknown

Books are the closest thing we have to entering another world, to time travel, or to parallel universes. A great book leaves you tired. Exhausted even. When you put a book down after the conclusion, it takes a split second the reorient yourself to your existence.  Depending on how epic the book is you just finished, you also feel…sad. An odd feeling of depression seems to hang over you once you leave the universe made up of ink, paper, and your mind.

According to my mother, when I was about 3, I grabbed a book, and demanded to be taught how to read. Dick and Jane books were my first novels. The first word I could read? “Look”. When I was about 4 I could “read” (aka recite) the entire book “Mike Mulligan and His Steam Shovel” to my then infant brother. I remember being about 6 or 7, dad coming home from a long day at work, and he would read some of “The Hobbit” by J.R.R. Tolkien to Sean and me. I remember my little girl imagination getting so wrapped up in the words dad would read and, as only a child could do, get totally lost in them. When dad would stop reading (it was typically bed time), I still remember the feeling of being jolted back to Earth.

                At some yard sale when I was about 10, my mother picked up a Nancy Drew mystery book for $0.25. I remember being so taken with this book, I hid it with my Bible to take to church that weekend. (Yes I did get scolded for reading it in church). This was my first experience of being locked in a world not my own that I could access myself (dad didn’t have to read it to me), and not wanting to leave it. I wanted more. This led me to an entire new experience. The “junior” section of the library! I quickly learned while the library didn’t have a limit on the number of books I could check out, my mother did. ;) Apparently you can’t come home with 40 books at a time when you have chores and homework to do.

                The best way I know how to describe the way I read is I devour books. When I go into a library or bookstore, I am like a starving kid at an all you can eat buffet. I don’t know how to pace myself. During nursing school, my first stop after the conclusion of every semester was the library. I would hide my textbooks, and read pure fiction having NOTHING to do with nursing. Freedom. I am also nostalgic about a physical book made of paper. Book readers (i.e. kindles) have their place, but I feel the need to be able to turn pages. I guess the danger of paper cuts adds to the excitement…

As tacky as this is, this blog was inspired by the fact I recently finished a series that I reminded me why I read. I am oddly sheepish to say that…yes…it was “The Hunger Games”. *ducks for tomatoes* Yes it is for “young adults” and I outgrew the young adult section when I was 16. Yes, my need to read it was brought on by the movie. *cringes again* But I will also admit I have recently not been reading. Work, TV, movies, and yes, the internet have been my distracters. (Oh I have other excuses! I work odd hours and the library isn’t open when I can go. I used to stop by Borders regularly and they are now out of business, etc.)

                My point of this particular rambling? Pick up a book again. Every year I reread all 6 Jane Austen novels and “The Lord of the Rings”. The first quarter of this year is already gone and I haven’t touched anything. *hides in shame*

               Already reading? Go support a local library. Read to a child. Find a book drive for a local school and donate. In this world of virtual worlds and constant stimulation, children, teenagers, and yes…even adults, need reminding what it means to curl up with a book.

The ironic and witty Jane Austen herself says it best:

                 “The person, be it gentleman or lady, who has not pleasure in a good novel, must be intolerably stupid.” ― Jane Austen

Go and live another life that you will only find in the pages of a book…