A Kiss

I’m sailing into the unknown.  I’ve been here before.  I’m probably here all the time.  In some moments grace just takes a bit more work.  Meeting new levels of depth in the ongoing discovery of my role in this incarnation.  The thrill of anticipation coupled with the void of mystery.  The death of what is making way for the flowering of what will be.  A kiss of affirmation from the universe is always welcome.  And recently, smooch, that’s just what I got.  From four exceptional men, one of them dead.

It occurred in a single afternoon.  Four separate rings of the cosmic doorbell.  Familiar these fellows and I are not, yet in our own individual ways, we’re all explorers of the heart, I’d say.

The three with a pulse I know just enough to offer you names and links.  Each is someone whose contribution to the world is illuminating.  The fourth, whose example is nothing short of profound, I’m chagrined to learn that I didn’t even know existed until he appeared in my mailbox that day by way of a compelling story in the New Yorker of February 12 & 19, 2018.

The only planned encounter was a phone meeting with FireHawk Hulin, a custodian of wisdom that has been integral to the earth since humankind has been able to think about such things.  For an hour or so we laughed and told stories as we worked our way around a medicine wheel he’d designed to help refine my approach to a podcast I’m in the process of birthing.  The audio version of select essays of mine.  Which, for some, means the most fear-provoking point of view the world has ever known: “Everything is a Gift.”  Finding a fearless, savvy playmate is always a treat.

Where our 700 foot driveway meets the dirt road we live on stands our big black mailbox.  In it that day were three other gems.

A postcard hello from Rob Perkins.  We met briefly a dozen or more years ago.  Randomly in touch since.  I thought of him recently and found his website, which sparked a note of admiration.  The postcard was his thanks.  Rob’s explorer impulses include the more traditional sense of the term, heading off solo in his canoe for long stretches to some of the rarest and least-peopled expressions of the earth’s wonder.  He’s made some well-praised documentary films about his explorations.  Books too.  He’s an astonishingly gifted writer and artist.  His website is stunning in its beauty, simplicity and depth.  He celebrates at the altar of solitude, as do I.  How enjoyable it would be if up irony’s sleeve is a plan for us to meet there someday.

Along with Rob’s greeting was a card from Michael Jager of Jager Design in nearby Burlington.  Another person I’ve met but a time or two in the 25 years Vermont has been my home.  He’s been one of those delightful troublemakers whose inner compass leads him and his colleagues in the direction of breaking the bonds of convention as they serve brands they love.  The passionate pursuit of writing a future we believe in is one way they put it.  So is “Solidarity of Unbridled Labour.”  I personally love aspirations like that.  Its meaning is depthless.  Pursued with passion, there’s always more to be revealed.  Living in the sacred ocean of becoming, doing our best not to kid ourselves that we know what’s what, is where the most trustworthy shapers of the future reside.  If you ask me.

And finally, in that New Yorker, a portrait of Henry Worsley, among the world’s great arctic explorers of any generation.  The author is David Gann, whose captivating book “Killers of the Flower Moon” stimulated my thinking last year.

It’s a small group of people who can even imagine the reality of spending in excess of two months attempting to trek on foot more than a thousand miles across Antarctica, arguably the most brutal environment in the world.

It is the driest and highest continent, with an average elevation of seventy-five hundred feet, ranging from sea level to mountain peaks in the ten thousand range.  Plus, it is the windiest continent with gusts reaching up to two hundred miles per hour.  The coldest, with temperatures in some places falling below minus seventy-five degrees.  One misstep can mean vanishing into the hidden chasm of a crevasse.  Crossing that world pulling a sled that, at the outset, with all your provisions, weighs over 300 pounds.  And doing so completely on your own, unsupported, making you the first person to ever attempt such a feat.  Painted on the front of Worsley’s sled was the mantra “Always a little further.”

After seventy-one days and nearly eight hundred nautical miles, Worsley, completely depleted, could go no further.  He called for the rescue plane.  “I’ll lick my wounds,” he said by phone, “I will heal over time, and I’ll come to terms with the disappointment.”  Sadly, he was suffering from bacterial peritonitis and died of organ failure within a few days.  He was fifty-five.

The thing is, Henry Worsley was not some nutcase with a death wish.  David Grann relates that this was not the first time, even in Antarctica, Worsley had navigated obliterating conditions, overcoming miseries that would have broken just about anyone else.  He was a retired and much decorated British Army officer, “a fiercely capable leader of men,” who had served in a renowned commando unit.  He was also a dedicated husband and father, a sculptor, a fierce boxer, a photographer who meticulously documented his travels, a horticulturalist, a collector of rare books and maps and fossils, and an amateur historian who became a leading authority on the legendary Ernest Shackleton.  Shackleton’s arctic exploits, a century before Worsley’s, made him a role model of exceptional leadership that, even today, is studied and celebrated across the spectrum of human endeavor.  From the time Worsley was a 19 year-old officer in training, there was no greater aspiration for him than to emulate the example of the man he considered his mentor, Ernest Shackleton.

What this story reminds me, and I feel can remind all of us, is not so much Henry Worsley’s exceptionalism, but rather that we share that exceptionalism with him.  Not that we’re going to tap dance across Antarctica.  But that in each of us exists an oceanic reservoir of courageous will and endurance that, if made friends with, can allow us to ever more effectively take on life’s most difficult challenges.  For instance, becoming a master of meeting whatever comes our way––even unimaginable heartbreak––with love.

Grateful is the best word I have for the universe’s kiss that day.  The presence of those four men, and the possibility they represent, has left me remembering one of my favorite sayings from who knows where:

None of us is who we think we are.  

None of us is that small. 

Our capacity for self-discovery is immeasurable.