How to Live in Heaven
“Happiness is when what you think, what you say, and what you do are in harmony.” - Gandhi
Hat tip: Light and Life and Pop Occulture
In looking at the USDA Forest Service map for possible horseback routes up to Horse Thief Meadow this weekend, I see that there's a creek running through it.
I have a former sister-in-law from Southern CA with whom I used to hike nearly every weekend. We were married to brothers, and neither one of us was happy at the time, soothing each other through the threats, intimidation and her black eyes (Years later, after I'd divorced mine and she was still married to hers, I heard about her cracked vertebrae and ribs ...), hence our escapes to the wilderness.
Free-wheeling D. loved to go skinny-dipping. Get that woman near a body of water, and she'd shed her clothes faster than this girl who grew up as a fundamentalist evangelical and who was pretty certain such an act of human depravity might just send her straight to the pit could object. And then she'd talk me into it too. (She had a good ten years on me and had already mastered the art of persuasion.)
D. had grown up in La Jolla, and her folks had a place there on the ocean as well as in the Hamptons. Her first honeymoon with her first husband (who she'd lost shortly thereafter in an automobile accident, something which had wounded her deeply) had been a year of traveling the world. She was one of the most "sophisticated" people I'd met at that point in my life. D. was from another world compared to mine. Heck, I'd worn overalls to high school, a fact that cracked her up.
Almost twenty years ago, we got busted swimming bare-butt naked in the Santa Fe watershed, our dogs barking on the shore to tell us the rangers had arrived. They turned their backs while we scrambled up to the shore, shivering, and got into our clothes...
You'd think that would have stopped me from taking off my clothes and wading into the water once and for all, but D.'s influence has apparently stuck, given my swim after a long, hot horse trek to Lake Johnson last summer.
I haven't seen D. in years, but if I did, I'd give her a hug and tell her she had been good for me. That knowing her had helped me along the path to waking from a deep sleep. You see, that's what meeting someone from another world can do.
In spite of her circumstances, D. always seemed to know a little something about how to live in heaven, although never quite enough to get her out of her marriage to a thug.
There probably won't be any skinnydipping after the horse trek to Horse Thief Meadow this Sunday though. And it won't be because I'm concerned about any divine repercussions. It will simply be too cold up there.
As I stand on the creek bank, however, I will definitely think of D. Just as I do each and every time I'm in the wilderness, and the water is calling to me.
