A Question of Perspective?

North Entrance to the Indian Peaks Wilderness

This is the North Entrance to the Indian Peaks Wilderness. To the left is the Roaring Fork drainage and to the right is the Doe Creek trailhead. Dead ahead, up the trail about 2,000ft higher in elevation, is Crater Lake. This area is a short drive from my current house and the picture is taken from the dirt road that goes into where some day my new house is going to be. (Just so you know where you are…).

These are trails I take the pups on pretty much every other day during either our shorter walks or longer day hikes. When you go out up here, you have the choice of either staying on the trail or cutting cross-country, and I often find myself standing somewhere in the woods or on a ridgeline, thinking about how odd it is for me, having spent decades in major urban areas, to find myself standing alone in the woods, just thinking, while the world out there beyond the ridge lines spins on…

When you live in a city you know, you learn to anticipate things…You know that at the corner of 12th and Main is the drug store and as you turn the corner of 11th and Main, you can look up to see the sign and approaching storefront. When you walk trails you have walked before, you can kind of get into the same mindset—there’s the rock outcropping, here comes the creek…But when you go off trail and cut cross-country, no matter how many times you do it, you find yourself continually shifting perspective, having a new take on things you “know” and experiencing things you weren’t ready for.

Last summer, I took the pups for a day hike up the Roaring Fork drainage. I like that trail since the first mile or so is pretty much straight up hill…it is pretty brutal and so most folks who don’t know the area don’t go there and settle for the easier trail around Monarch Lake or others nearby. As you get in there a ways, the trail splits off from the creek and heads up over a ridgeline, toward Stone Lake. I had seen some other hikers earlier and knew there were people somewhere on the trail ahead. (Okay…so when you live here, you get a little persnickety about wanting to have an area to yourself!!). Instead of staying on the trail, we continued to simply follow the creek…up and up…climbing over rocks and stepping through underbrush, getting higher and higher with each step and (very much…) labored breath.

Several things happened to me on this hike that gave me pause:

First off, we’re running right along the creek which, while small, is still ripping along at a pretty good clip and making a, uh, roaring noise that is pretty loud (people who name things tend to be pretty straight forward…Roaring Fork Creek…Gravel Mountain…I like that kind of simplicity in naming things!), and so the pups and I step out of some brush into this opening next to the creek and I look up and BAM—there’s a buck walking down toward us from somewhere up above. He is good sized with a compact, though impressive, rack…And so we just stop. But he keeps coming, kind of looking down as he’s picking his way along, until he looks up and sees us. Pearl and Rasta are stopped next to me, sitting at my side, the buck is at this point less than 20 feet ahead of me, he stops short, turns his head and we lock eyes….

I’m not sure how long it was…couldn’t have been more than a few seconds, but it felt like minutes… we just both stared at each other and waited for the other to move, which the other didn’t… finally, he turned, took a few jumps and was off into the brush…

Secondly, I’m cruising through the woods along the creek, the dogs bounding off to my right and left (I always keep them kind of close, in case we run into a moose or like the deer above…), and I’m cutting up a small hillside, looking down to make sure I don’t stumble on a rock or something, and I am lifting my foot, just about to put it down and BAM—there’s a ptarmigan roosting right there, just under my foot and I’m about to crush it! I jerk myself over to one side and almost fall over and yet, here’s this bird sitting on its nest, protecting its eggs and not about to move for anyone. I took a few steps to the side and just looked at it, since I’d never seen one so close up before (they usually blow-up into the air in a big explosion of feathers and weird ptarmigan noises as soon as you get near…). It was totally camouflaged, speckled brown and white with flecks of black and totally unseen, sitting there on the open earth…

Thirdly, I come up over this ledge, the creek now just a little dribble, and the space above the ledge opens into this high country meadow—wide open, lush and green, with wild flowers and big chunks of rock scattered about, warm from the sun and all of it just resting at the top of the world. I pull myself up a ridgeline that kind of runs around the meadow and turn around and there it is, BAM—the whole drainage, just laid out ahead of me, spreading out down below, no trail, no people, just expanse and openness, with this deep blue sky above, a breeze like a warm breath moving over my skin and the hard, warm rock beneath me.

And I am just, you know, there…feeling still fully connected to the buck somewhere off below, the bird on her nest and the earth warming my butt as I sit propped on the rock, still…

Perspective.

I used to think that I was pretty well connected and had the “right” take on most issues of the day, that I had a good perspective on things. And I still think that I have a good set of values that screen my world and help me interpret what is righteous and what is not…

But I wonder how many of our problems are created by the fact that we build worlds around us that help make it easier for us to exist (after all, one can’t spend every second of every day contemplating the deeper meanings of each element that presents itself to you!). Yet, I also think we need to forcibly break out of our heads, break down our world views and attempt to regain a greater perspective of where we are, how we are connected to others and the planet and what this whole thing is about…

But for the most part, I don’t see that…

I see people convinced of their own righteousness and world view and, having set a course for “projects” to be completed within “this” time frame, they plow right ahead, toward their goal.

Even the so called “thought leaders” are locked in their own “progressive track” of attempting to out do each other and be viewed as more visionary and deeply insightful than others.

You see entrepreneurs (both social and traditional) who begin with a vision and passion for some deeper truth or opportunity and then they end up creating a business or NGO with a budget and agenda and need to be fed regularly and they end up defending that beast against all others, so that they can barely celebrate the victories of others in their space, since to see others advance feels like they are being left behind, because, at the end of the day, they have lost perspective…

And you see wealthy folks who were once “normal,” who now have confused financial success with real life wisdom or deeper knowledge and seem to think that they are actually smarter or something than others and now that they have ended up surrounded by folks who schmooze them and want things have come to actually believe they ARE smarter, better looking and funnier than god knows they actually are…

For the most part, all these people (each within their own space and world) are what I think of as “path people“, meaning they stay on the trail and plug on, step after step, moving toward their goal, but missing the larger picture and experience of what all is actually around them.

Now, don’t YOU go get all judgmental on me…

I’m not saying that MY perspective and current lifestyle is the ONE and these other folks aren’t doing good things as well…

but what I get continually surprised by is how many of these folks don’t seem to be fully conscience of the fact that they are there—positioned on the trail—and remain largely unconnected to the space and time around them. I can’t help feeling that somehow the value of whatever they are doing, the full value of their life time spent in pursuit of whatever it is they are doing, isn’t somehow diminished as a part of their having such a narrow perspective on their position in the world…

I was just at a meeting hosted by the World Economic Forum in Geneva, and met a new friend who is a great guy by the name of Hylton Appelbaum, from South Africa. He is a funny guy who, it strikes me, has the right perspective of humility in the face of true challenges. He works with the Nelson Mandela Children’s Fund and in closing one of his emails to me he said that he looked forward to continuing our discussions and that, “perhaps, we might actually be able to do something to help the victims of our benevolence.”

That, it strikes me, is an example of the correct perspective to take to our work…a sense of vision and hope for creating positive change in the world, yet a knowledge that in our “good works” we may also carry the seeds of destruction…

…and that we must tread lightly, lest we miss seeing the buck, or risk crushing the roosting hen or, equally worse, lose sight of how all these smaller experiences are part of one larger world that is, at its core, whole and connected to all its parts, of which we are just one…

So, what do you think?

How does perspective shift?

Can we force others to see things they do not want to see?

How does the “right” perspective change over time and does that mean the perspective we had is less than the one we’re evolving?

Is there a way we can maintain what I would call the passion of full perspective that affirms the blend of our lives and at the same time can focus us enough to actually get something done in the course of a day?

These are just some of the things I’m mulling over as I start my day…

time to take the dogs for a walk in the woods…

off the trail!!

best to you,

jed