Love and hate in a mountain town

We are (temporarily?…?!) living in a small town, a Mountain Town as I like to call it. We live at 2,500 feet elevation. It’s beautiful, there is no doubt about it, but I didn’t want to move here. I felt our life was established in the Bay Area, living in our City by the Bay. I fought leaving this city. Tooth and nail. Kicking and screaming. I did everything that I could to stay, but I had to leave, and had to, eventually, end up here.

It’s quiet here. No horns honking, no people screaming in the streets, no banging bass sounds filtering in through our closed double-paned windows in the early morning hours each night. My husband and I loved that noise. It sounded like home.

But, now that noise has been replaced by relative silence with the exception of occasional wildlife noise outside our cabin door. We have two zany squirrels that share our yard. We see them daily. A slew of birds pass by, but two beautiful blue jays appear to be permanent guests. Instead of hearing homeless men yell at commuters on the street, we often hear the squirrels and blue jays squawking. Several deer, a mama and two babies, drop by to chew on our hedge a couple of times a week.

Slowly, on an almost daily basis, I fall in love with this town. It’s a slow, drawn out process. I consider this temporary, and I still see myself heading back to that beautiful City by the Bay. In the meantime, I live this quiet life with a gratitude for the roof over our heads, for the expansive pine tree whose stump takes up almost half of our front yard and whose branches provide a canopy of shade that I know we will fall in love with during the coming hot, dry summer months. There’s a lot to love, but there is no avoiding the push-pull of our love/hate relationship.

Most days I try to find things that I love. I want the love to tip the scales over hate. I credit this small town for my enhanced love of the outdoors. How many can leave their front door walk about a mile or so, and be on the Pacific Crest Trail? Many days I have woken up feeling sorry for my life (no job, no income), but typically on those days all I need to do is walk outside, and with each mile I feel my inner strength matching that of my outer strength. Each stride helps to clear my head. It gives me peace.

I pass beauty with each step, whether it be wildlife

or my empathetic neighbor, who, for these past two months has quietly continued her personal memorial to the Sandy Hook Tragedy:

These are just two things that I love about my town. Each day I wake up and continue my love/hate with my town, but since I’m naturally a positive person..love/beauty on most days will always win out against hate.

Don’t worry? Not easy but worth the effort

My bride comes by worry honestly. It’s woven into her DNA, a sort-of default status that her brain clicks to if she doesn’t give it a better alternative.

She married a guy who didn’t get it. For most of our married life, I was immune to worry, even at times when worry would have absolutely been the most sane reaction to the events at hand. But I had help. I drank. A lot. And that had an amazing ability to drown worry with bravado and recklessness before it ever got fired up.

Then I went to rehab. Guess what happened? I developed an anxiety disorder. The bride got the last laugh on that one — but alas, the bride doesn’t work like that. She simply understood better than I did the things I was feeling. She showed me all the empathy I lacked.

I’m convinced worry has a toxic effect on our well-being. Eastern spirituality talks of it in terms of energy and aura. This is useful. A negative, worry-filled outlook colors everything else, seeping through our bodies with deleterious effect.

Rooting out the worry from our lives is one of the healthiest, hoof to head things we can do.

Now we both deal with worry in more proactive ways. I don’t drink. She tries not to ruminate and let her mind race ahead to a future of doom. We use our spiritual exercises in the morning to stay in the present and give the worry to God.

We also hike. It’s amazing how a trek past a gorgeous madrone grove (see above photo) can take your mind off the troubles you literally walked away from.

When I hike, my mind races towards gratitude. It just flows that way. The more grateful I am for the blessings of this life, the less room I have for worry.

I take comfort in the scriptures that reveal a God who, unlike me, shows tremendous empathy toward our inclination to worry. Jesus reminds us that God takes care of the worry-free lilies and birds whose needs are met. He sent his disciples out with nothing and said their needs would be provided. Before he left he gave a strong reminder:

“Do not let your hearts be troubled,” he said.

St. Paul strikes me as a guy who once suffered from some serious worry. But in one of the most tremendous passages of ancient writing (Philippians 4) he tells us “be anxious for nothing” and to simply pray instead.  From the barren loneliness of a prison cell he tells us the secret of contentedness.

“I can do all things through Christ who strengthens me,” he wrote.

Paul had plenty to worry about and opted instead for joy and faith, which seems to have worked better than wine.

Don’t worry, be happy, the saying went. It wasn’t bad advice.