Seclusion Hill
In my early training, my spiritual teacher, David, told me that as a witch I’d been thrown off a cliff many times. Whether standing well-behind my partner who peered over the rim of Chaco Canyon in New Mexico or back from my husband’s and my 4th floor apartment’s balcony railing in Washington D.C., I was resisting, only partially successfully, my body’s rising feeling of disappearing below (and including) my knees. In Arizona, once driving high, sinuous roads edging deep chasms with my younger daughter, I imagined my legs extending through the car, deep beneath the asphalt, dragging against the car’s slow speed.
On a Sunday morning I returned to climb Seclusion Hill behind Meherazad, where Meher Baba’s one remaining mandali, disciple, lived. I had done this climb seventeen years before on my first pilgrimage to Meherabad and only once since. I wrote about that climb in “Craggy Steps,” describing my feeling at seventy-one as “unsure” then “empowered” and “gingerly sitting within a meter of the top,” until with my bottom firmly on rock I could “relax” and “enjoy” the surrounding agricultural valley.
Needing photos for that story, I made a second trip and this time my confidence was high. My feet eagerly and competently followed the path to reach the narrow width on top, an arm of rock extending beyond where I’d first sat, the hill dropping steeply away on both sides. To my amazement, I walked within a body’s length of the end, for the first time in my life feeling—fearless.
My realization is, “We live with experiences over which we appear to have no control, yet by guidance beyond rational explanation, we may change through that interrelationship and our intent and effort.”