Hero Worship and its Discontents

We live in a society that worships heroes - athletes, movie stars, politicians. Many of us also get spiritually ga-ga over social activists like Che Guevera and Cesar Chavez and religious all-stars like Mother Theresa and the Dalai Lama. [Once during a psychology class in high school, the teacher asked everyone to write down on a piece of paper the name of a person they idolized and turn it in. The teacher wrote everyone's idol down on the chalkboard (mine was John Lennon). She asked if anybody noticed what all of these heroes had in common. Nobody could figure it out and she finally told us what it was - they were all men! I guess my feminist consciousness meter was dreadfully low at age 16.]

This practice of hero worship seems to be common in old patriarchal cultures like ours with roots in Greek and Roman civilizations. It's also commensurate with our culture's emphasis on individual over communal development. It's the American way - we reify a myth that great people achieve great things all by themselves. They use their wits, their fearlessness and strength to do what the rest of us dim, scared, weak people can't.

This obvious fallacy overlooks the fact that extraordinary people are nested in a web of connections to people and processes. These great men have wives and secretaries. These social activists have rank and file members doing the organizing grunt work. Religious leaders have their own mentors as well as congregants who support their spiritual practice. Michael Jordan would not be a basketball hero if nobody had watched his games. Rich people get rich because there are poor people to help them get rich (that's Marxism 101). Unfortunately, this hero worship can be frustrating and destructive as we struggle and wonder why we can't do it alone. It distracts us from how things really operate in the world.

But, we are drawn to people with special, charismatic energy and their stories. These stories can obviously be fulfilling and inspiring in some way. One of my favorite literary genres has always been autobiography/memoir. I love to read about exceptional things that people do, the challenges they face and the victories they achieve in spite of them. I crave the words that speak of the wisdom they attain along the way. But inevitably, writ deeply in these memoirs, is the insight that they didn't do it alone, that so many other people really made it happen. They always thank their mother and father.

Follow your bliss

It had been raining for a couple of days without a break. And when the sun was shining yesterday morning, it seemed pretty clear that it was time to go on a hike. The next one marked in my Day Hikes in the Catskills book had silently and patiently been waiting its turn. I was a bit concerned that it might be too muddy. Though there was a small pool at the beginning of the trail and a few stretches of the trail higher up that had become a stream, for the most part, the trail was fine.

We climbed Windham High Peak which is just slightly over 3500 feet with 1700 feet of incline over the course of the ascent. (The picture here is from near the top where you can see the Blackhead Range.) It took us about 3 hours to ascend and 2 hours on the return. And about a half hour break for cheese and cucumber sandwiches and morning glory muffins I threw together that morning before our departure.

My husband asked me at some point on the hike why I thought people wanted to do things like climb Mt. Everest and such. There are times when I might have answered something about human egos and the desire to achieve greatness or complete a challenge or something to that effect. But, my answer was, "because they love it." They love to climb and be present with the earth in a way, with impeccable attention, that our everyday lives do not seemingly allow. I think that's right. I'm sure there is a lot of macho weirdness that goes on and those people that do such things are a bit crazy, doubtless. But, just doing something out of pure joy and being driven by that pure joy is such a rare gift. Most of what we do in life seems to come out of a sense of duty and shoulds. "I should get up and go to work and make my lunch and work on this report and call this person and buy groceries and..."

I think it was almost 20 years ago when I first encountered Joseph Campbell's work. He opened my eyes to a new way of thinking about religion, myth and meaning making in this world. His most famous phrase, "follow your bliss," is priceless. Everyone knows what it means and appreciates it, but it's rare when we can feel it in our bones. I'm finally beginning to understand what he meant. There are unusual people who seem to know how to follow their bliss when they come into the world. I guess it has taken me so long because my bliss has been obscured by so many clouds of confusion. I can say that quieting down and surrounding myself with the right people and right geography has helped me to learn that following my bliss is much different than chasing a dream.

Common Sense

"We are afraid to admit
that we could be building bridges
right now...
it is time to remember what I already know
it is time to gather the tools I already have
time to walk forward naked in the direction
where my heart's voice tells me to go
confident that my tools and my knowledge
will be at hand when I need them...
I vow to build a bridge
over this gulf of imagination
that pretends to separate
my awareness of my own needs
from my awareness of the needs of the planet"
Excerpted from "Common Sense" by Paul Williams

This poem, written in 1986 comes from a pamphlet published by THYB which stands for "tai hei yo bashi," Japanese for "the bridge over the great ocean." I love the fact that this poem is called "Common Sense." This common sense, or intution, is perpetually masked by our neurotic behaviors, obsessions with the dialectic of success and failure, and fears of standing still and listening. We already have everything we need. We already have everything we need. (Yeah, had to say it twice). Look around. Look within. Quiet down and just do it. Build a bridge over your opinions. Your opinions have never helped you or anyone else. Your wisdom, or common sense, wants to break free of the confines we impose on it. Let it out of jail. Free.

Life in the Garden of Eden

This modest little trailer sits outside Windham, NY next to a restaurant called the Garden of Eden Cafe, a place where construction workers, hikers, locals, and people with second homes in the area go for good coffee, curry chicken wraps, homemade chili, and baked goods. As we were leaving the cafe this afternoon, I noticed this humble entrepreneurial venture selling ice cream and it struck me as quite noble.

Before lunch, we had hiked in the Huntersfield State Forest on Mount Pisgah in the Northern Catskills. The trail is part of the Long Path, which was conceived some 75 years ago with the intention of creating a foot trail from New York City to the Adirondacks (right now though it only goes between some place in New Jersey and Albany). The trail was so named in honor of a Walt Whitman line, "the long brown path that leads wherever I choose." It was about a 6 mile trek with over 1000 feet of incline taking about 3 hours total. It was a nice little jaunt for a Thursday morning.

We were completely alone on the trail, always a necessary condition for a good hike, in my mind. The trail is not often hiked, rendering the terrain a bit rugged - lots of overgrown vegetation which makes the footing a challenge. That's what I love about hiking though the most - the footing. Foot to earth, earth to foot. When you're really present with it, the mountain is hiking you, the energy and momentum is coming from someplace in the earth. It feels like you could never fall and hurt yourself, you know right where to step and your feet and the rocks are like magnets on metal.