DAY THREE: TAUPO HUT TO GREENSTONE HUT
I wake up after a night full of dreams. “Did you dream?” I ask the bearded Israeli guy.
“I always dream,” he says.
“Probably because you wake up a lot sleeping on the trail,” I say. In studying the practice of dream yoga, I’ve heard that if you wake yourself up periodically you will stay in the dream state rather than sinking more deeply into unconscious sleep. Here, you can work with conscious dreaming.
“It doesn’t make a difference. You always dream. If you wake up more, you remember more,” he says. He is very sure of himself. I am not that skilled a dream yogi yet, so I don’t know if that’s true.
He’s eating porridge from his cooking pan as I strap on my pack. “Going already?” he says. Rain is predicted for that day and I want to try to reach the Greenstone Hut before the bad weather.
“It’s a nice hut,” he says encouragingly. “Flush toilets, two bedrooms and a big common room.”
I look at him and want to keep in touch. Something holds me back.
I always fall in love with my own underdeveloped qualities. When I was in grad school for creative writing, my ideal man was Dave Eggers (proficient at slipping between the the worlds of fiction and nonfiction and short story while telling some of the most important stories like What is the What, about the Sudanese Lost Boys and Zeitoun about Hurricane Katrina. And he helps children.). When I was trying to learn to ski, I got involved with a ski patroller. As a yoga student, I fell for a teacher or two because of their access to the mystical. Now, although bearded Israeli is a wonderful person, I know I am intrigued more by the ability to spend half the year wearing a pack. I am in love with freedom more than anything. Anyway, I couldn’t keep up with him.
The outside company is fine, but don’t depend on it. Be independent of everything. If it comes, fine. If it goes, wonderful. – Swami Satchinanada
Bearded Israeli’s energy reinvigorates me; I am smiling through the hours of paying attention to each step as much a possible, of dropping my thoughts when I notice them and expanding the edges of my consciousness outward to meet the sky and wind and water, the trees and grasses. The trail is still flat, meandering through cow pastures. Since India, I can’t seem to escape cow patties. Fires made from them, fences, and now in New Zealand it’s a sport to avoid stepping in one.
“I am afraid of the cows,” a young British Te Araroa walker had told me. “One charged me.” It is funny how the cows stare at you, head-on, but I can’t imagine any of these being aggressive. Maybe it’s habitual from India, but I see them as really beautiful. And the calves scamper like puppies, their fur ruffled as their rumps rear up and their gangly legs collect themselves after each leap.
It’s kind of killing me that I have organic beef jerky in my pack. The tantric Buddhist way is to eat meat and pray for the animal’s liberation. I find a cow-free field and eat the jerkey for lunch, thinking that now the cows might not sense that I’m a predator. It is so, so wrong that we eat anything with a face.
As the sun moves higher the trail climbs into the trees and the beeches rustle with a cooling breeze. The clouds huddle and it seems like the rain will hold off. I keep losing the orange-tipped posts and after a while stop looking for them. The day loses itself in mantra and the silence of the now vast forest.
I find a hut at the base of a hill in the late afternoon and approaching, see that it’s locked up. Passburn Hut, says the sign. And the trail has ended in fenced-off ranch pastures. The cows stare moon-faced as I shimmy up the scree above the hut to try to get a view of orange-tipped posts. Why don’t I have a map or a compass?
I walk the ledges and descend into fields where a river is running. The rushing water is the only sound. There is no one near. The cows might not be looked in on for weeks. There is no sign of the trail I lost earlier in the day.
I think, maybe I will die here. My exact thought is, “If I die here, at least I will not have been in a cubicle trying to look busy.” No offence intended to anyone currently sitting in a cubicle; we all have our singular definition of hell.
I think of bearded Israeli guy and his happy demeanor. His life is not easy; he just smiles anyway. I smile. I think, “So what; my body hurts and I’m kind of a sucky backpacker. But I’m in New Zealand and it’s beautiful and this is exactly where I want to be.”
“Anyway,” I think as I slide back down the scree and lurch into a river to backtrack. “It’s not my fault that the trail is shitty.”
I have a sleeping bag and food. I can make a shelter if needed. I talk myself through the climb back into the trees. I can feel an upswell of inner resources rushing to meet every attempt to positively react. And suddenly, there is nothing to react against. There is no effort; I am In It. The simplicity and power of the moment is all that exists. There are no extraneous thoughts; there is nothing to attain; nothing missing. I find an orange pole. I follow it down to a river crossing in the next valley.
I sit on a rock in the beech trees and feel a sense of belonging. There is nothing the earth demands. I don’t have to be anything but here. now.
“Your yoga is my hiking,” the bearded Israeli had said. This is what I had fallen for. The effortlessness of the moment when you can let it in.
When you pass through fear, what you are left with is love. Not The Notebook kind of silly sappy love. The love of the goddess. Who can give birth and eat her young. Who can hold all of creation, the animals on their way to slaughter, our confusion about losing the ones we love, the extinction of species, the poisoning of water, the mountaintops being blown off, the women who are slaves, the ones who wage war, who can hold it all in the deepest form of protective mother-love and also remain steady within herself. Who holds equally the kindness of people, the selfless acts and joyful moments and generosity of strangers.
Tara, the Mother of the Buddhas, smiles slightly as she contains this. It’s called equanimity. And I don’t usually have it.
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