Crying for a vision

I’ve settled back into the doldrums of routine work, and the quiet drizzle and mist hanging over the hills to the southeast this morning draw me back to the fog and tall conifers of Marys Peak.

Two weeks ago while we were in Corvallis we drove up to that place, the highest point in the Oregon Coast Range and a Kalapuyan vision quest site, and walked the trails. It was our first full day at our rented house and overcast at the peak and we were a little bit sick, having caught a bug on the plane, so it was a good day to keep to ourselves and stay on the level ground at the top, not push too hard.

I am at a point in my life where I need to begin something new, and that thing is not clear, though it rings its bell in my mind. The past two years after traveling in late summer, opportunities have come at home—possibly coincidence, or the result of my watchfulness or openness. Maybe something will happen this time, too.

Following the trails in the fog on Marys Peak, I thought of the directness of a vision quest, the pleading for purpose and gift from greater powers, different from my negative frustrated churning and the conversations I have with other humans in coffee shops or offices about changing some part of my life, but not willing to be swept up, completely filled, overcome. Not even thinking of it.

Having lived mostly in the Midwest, what understanding I have of vision quests comes mostly through stories of Plains peoples—of Black Elk going up to what was then called Harney Peak in the Black Hills, the highest point, and raising his hands and making his pleas even as an old man. I think of the purposes of his vision still being fulfilled after his physical life ended. Yet I, with such privilege and making so little effort, want purpose and want it in my lifetime.

Marys Peak catches the sea air and draws water from the sky with its trees. At the edge of the summit meadow, where we could barely see a hundred feet ahead that afternoon, I compared the tips of Douglas-fir, hemlock, noble fir and grand fir. Walking, we tasted salmonberries and oxalis and watched the chipmunks’ constant gathering, the ravens at some game.

In the forest, I kept hearing owls and wanted them to be spotted owls, but they were far off and my birding app wouldn’t pick them up, and my voice recording app wouldn’t, yet I heard them with my own fine hearing and probably they were Great Horned owls as the call was similar and the recordings of the spotted owls I listened to later were not what I heard.

I could call my years of earning my bread (if I really have earned it) a long process of sorting or complaining or avoiding—not grading papers anymore, not traveling to conventions anymore, not commuting anymore, not wearing dress clothes, not begin limited to two weeks’ vacation a year, not moving for a job—and only a little reaching for what I did want, for what I might give. I have let myself be caught by the wrong course, the wrong frame or box; I have only decided how much I can stand. I have thought of myself. I have not been imagined enough. I have not listened in the right way. Can I now, even now?