Oregon (Part 1)

The Columbia River called me.  I don’t know how or why.   I just went.  And hiked like a madwoman.  Like a woman who had no idea where the fuck she was going.  Like a woman who had something to prove to herself or maybe something to remember.  I hiked like a woman who had cracked under the weight of loss and grief.  I arrived around midnight from Maui and stayed in an awful motel just east of Portland, the kind where all the rooms reek of cigarette smoke.  I didn’t even bother turning down the sheet, just laid my travel blanket atop the bed and curled up for a few hours.  I hit the road early and caught my first view of the gorge.  It was breathtaking and mysterious and still calling so I began to make my way down waterfall alley, hike by hike as large birds of prey swooped and circled at the tree line.  The trees were burnt in places and I walked through echoes of blazes that devastated this landscape six years prior.  The forest was still reeling and growing anew at the same time.  I felt like I was in the right place.  After all, six years is not a long time.  It’s how long my mother’s been dead.  But looking at the char of some of the trunks, you’d think it just happened.   

I treaded lightly. 

My steps on the ground became a silent mantra.   Because I didn’t know what the fuck to say.  Or have anyone to say it to.  I took thirty thousand of them on that first day of my journey.  And I swam in the most perfect waterfall I ever laid eyes on and let the cold water calm the fire in my heart.  I crossed the river and meditated on it from the other side, watched the sun set and rise, picked berries, drove to nearby towns and sat by little brooks listening to the soft trickle of water like I had nothing else in the world to do. I gasped when I saw the white peak of Mount Hood rising out of acres and acres of the most beautiful forest green I’ve ever seen.  I gorged on peaches and cherries and nectarines, got drunk on lavender and made my way up and down the mountain.  I walked down earthen pathways framed with moss draped branches and drank the sunlight out of streams. 

I felt free and relaxed.

I arrived in Eagle Creek on my third day, brimming already with the magic of my first visit to the pacific northwest.  The purpose of the trip before me, to immerse myself in the study and practice of gi gong with my teacher’s teacher, a woman who had been practicing since she was four years old and a master since the age of fourteen.  A woman who evaded communist China via France and made her way to Oregon where she emanates her wisdom and chi and healing to hundreds if not thousands of students and clients.  I met Master Liu He some ten or so years prior when we invited her to teach on Maui and the radiance of her energy left a lasting impression.  In her presence, I feel the strength of lineage and cosmic knowledge that goes back I don’t know how many generations.  It’s wisdom that is old and laced with mystery, simplicity, magic and truth.  It’s practice that preserves the tao and the natural, mystical way of things, before what is now called Traditional Chinese Medicine became something clinical and institutionalized.  These are observations from the ancients passed down, a catalogue of their musings on the universe recorded in movement and breath and pause.  All the qi gong happens in the pause.  We think we are doing something in the movements but really the chi is doing something to us in the pause.  Even though I thought I was going somewhere, I thought this trip was about something, I needed to go nowhere first.  And in that no-place, I remembered everything.  I felt everything.  I surrendered everything. 

 And then I kept going. 

I’d been warned about Portland.  That when people say it’s weird, what they really mean is dark.  I’d been warned of how the city had changed over the last few years, becoming a hotbed for unsheltered addicts in places.  I’d been warned not to stay in certain areas or park my rental car in others.  I heeded those warnings and found them to be mostly true, especially against the background of nature I had just emerged from.  I can’t even call it a culture shock now because since then I’ve experienced so many actual culture shocks but it was a shock nonetheless.  So I made the best of it and did what you do in cities.  I sought out the best food, of which there is an endless supply in Portland.  I spent a long afternoon getting lost at a real live bookstore, the infamous Powell’s.  I spent a blissful morning amidst beds of roses and drank tea at the Japanese Gardens.  It was ok but I felt a bit lonely.  I would find out on the journey ahead that this was a pattern.  I always felt lonely in cities.  But when I immersed myself in nature, I was more than happy to be alone.

I was in heaven.

to be continued…