Jeaux Bartlett
Fresh from a restorative night of non-parenting, my spouse, Adam, and I take on the Trail of Ten Falls, at Oregon’s Silver Falls State Park. We’ve escaped our house and its adolescent miasma for an overnight getaway. It’s a crisp winter morning, a few days into the New Year, and we’re curious how far we can go. I’m starting off 2020 with some soul-replenishing forest bathing.
We didn’t leave the kids home alone. We can’t. While the impending pandemic is only a blip of worry on the horizon and we have no idea the tumult it’ll bring, we know our twelve-year-old needs supervision. So Adam’s sister stays the night to keep an eye on the kids, make sure they eat dinner, go to bed, wake up again the next day. It’s exhausting, the worry and anxiety. We’ve needed this break, this excursion into the grounding of nature.
After an hour of hiking, I check the map and realize the next waterfall is several miles away. Also, the bottom of waterfalls is down, and the park lodge is way way up. Feeling satisfactorily deafened, awed, and dampened, we head back, turning away from the chill of the waterfalls. The promise of something hot to drink at the lodge fuels our ascent as we trudge back up the slope.
I feel invigorated–and a little sweaty. I need these feel-good hormones coursing through my system. The storm that breaks during the coming lockdown is brewing and I feel its pressure build. We’ve yet to witness its aftermath, the devastation it wreaks in our family’s life, but I know my child needs more than they’re getting, possibly more than I know how to give. This isn’t a small dip on their path. It’s a ravine.
Around a bend in the trail, a dad and his teenage son come into view, hiking toward us. My chest squeezes with a pang of unwelcome envy–a parent who can get his kid into the woods.
I’d brought our two youngest a few years earlier, back when they still wanted to go on an end-of-the-school-year camping trip with me. A typical Oregon June, it rained most of the weekend, but they didn’t care. They played made-up games in the puddles, a Pokémon-Minecraft mashup involving tossing rocks and splashing.
Now, though, they’re more content to be plugged into technology. And despite how good I know it is for their adolescent bodies and hearts, I’m weary of dragging them out into the splendor of nature for it to be ruined by whining. I need my forest bathing accompanied by silence.
As the man and his son hike past, I realize they’re both looking at the ground.
Look up! I want to shout at their retreating backs. Look at the trees, as they branch into the sky. Look at these magnificent beings turning CO2 into oxygen for us. Look how they keep the soil intact. Feel their solidness, their grounding presence. Look up!
For a moment, I feel vindicated by my superior way of being. Then I remember: I do this, too.
I hike in beautiful forests yet keep my eyes keenly on the trail. I catch myself, gaze down, looking for rocks I might trip over. Why can’t I trust my hiking poles to keep me steady and my feet to find their way? To be like the runner, or the deer, lithely springing up the trail, head high, full of confidence?
I have this habit on the path of life, as well: focusing on the road ahead, wary of pitfalls and obstacles. As if that will keep me from tripping. I understand why I do this. Life has thrown me a number of unexpected detours: divorce, chronic illness, puddle-jumping little kids becoming self-destructive teens.
At these times, keeping my head down is necessary for survival. Looking for the very next steps, the very next breaths, and taking them, are what I must do so I don’t trip and fall over the downed branches from life’s storm. So I’m not broken by the journey.
But once the experience passes, anxiety tells me to keep looking down. To look out for the next fall. If I’m vigilant enough, anxiety tells me, perhaps I can prevent it.
Anxiety has become a familiar part of my life. It’s the friend who gossips, who tells me the worst possible outcomes of a situation, who watches too much news. Anxiety pretends it’s trying to prepare me for the worst, to help me out. Some friend.
This seems like a relationship I need to set firm boundaries in. But rather than trying to shut it down or shut it out, I’ve learned anxiety is best welcomed in.
Fighting against anxiety makes it stronger. Resisting gives it something to either dig its claws into or push back against. But when I let go of fighting it, when I acknowledge it for what it is, it lets go, too. Perhaps this takes anxiety by surprise. When I make space for it, when I open the door, invite it in for a cup of tea, it relaxes.
I’m not a practicing Buddhist, but my new approach to anxiety–learned through years of dealing with it thanks to the tempest of teenagers–reminds me of the story of the Buddha inviting the demon god Mara in to tea.
As Tara Brach writes in Radical Acceptance, “Instead of ignoring Mara or driving him away, the Buddha would calmly acknowledge his presence, saying, ‘I see you, Mara.’ He would then invite him for tea and serve him as an honored guest… Mara would stay for a while and then go…”
There’s a reason for this. Sitting with strong emotions, like anxiety, increases your distress tolerance. Distress tolerance, a term used in Dialectical Behavioral Therapy–knowledge I gained during the storm of the pandemic–describes your ability to hold discomfort without reacting to it. Developing a greater capacity for distress tolerance reduces how strong anxiety feels. It’s still there. But it doesn’t bother you as much.
Fortunately, there’s plenty of room for anxiety in the forest.
When I walk in the woods and notice anxiety is walking with me, I can let it be. Even thank it for pointing out the ankle-twister rocks or the steep drop off from the trail. “Yes, anxiety, it would hurt if I slipped and tumbled down that. You’re right.”
And then notice the ferns by the side of the trail, or the trillium blooming, or whatever is going on in the forest at that moment. There’s always nature to notice.
On the trail with Adam, I look up and see what’s around me, not just the potential pitfalls on the path ahead. The growth, the lush richness of life, the variety and beauty. All of it.
My hiking poles catch on a tree root, and I stumble. I lurch forward, halting my fall with the other pole, and stand up again. I regain solid footing. I’m still here. The forest is still here. It’s all OK right here in this moment. I breathe.
We hike up a series of steep switchbacks, one foot in front of the other. The only way back to the lodge is on this trail. Even before the forced knowledge I acquire through the upcoming years of guerrilla parenting, I know the only way out of something is often through it. I’ve got to keep on going, even when I start to tell myself the journey–or this trail in the woods–is never ending.
The next few years are hard. Anxiety flares often, alerting me to the very real danger my children are in. I make many mistakes. I trip, I fall, I stumble. But I keep going. I keep breathing, looking up, and looking around–at the scenery, the growth, the change, the wonder of it all. They live, the teens. And so do I. Side by side with each other, with our anxiety, and with many shared cups of tea.