Pain...

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Belihuloya to Haputale
Kilometers: 36.8       Elevation gain/loss: 1,608m/700m


Today I don't walk for the joy of walking, nor for the challenge, nor to get to my next destination. Today I am heartbroken. Today my stomach has contracted to a tiny hard golfball, and in my throat is a ball of hot wire, and my chest is tight and squeezed with something sharp and glasslike. Under my breastbone, spasms rasp at something which feels very core. My beloved little fellow, my Sausage, has died, and I am so terribly sad. I was not there to hold him in his last moments. I could do nothing.

Sausage was not a cat. He was a mad, loving, funny, crazy little man trapped in a small and furry body. He had more personality than most people I know, and loved with complete abandon. Don't think he was just a cat.

He was unique in all the world.

Today I am walking because I have to move all this emotional pain down out of my vital organs, into my legs and feet, and into the earth, into a much simpler pain made of blisters, sweat and lactic acid. Physical pain is so easy. I do not need complex philosophical paradigms to make sense of a bleeding foot. The snuffing out of the little spark that was my Sausage... that just rips jagged holes in my being. I feel porous. Raw. Gutted. Today I will walk until I am too tired to walk any more, so I can drop from exhaustion and sleep a body sleep, dark and quiet. For a few hours, I will hide in that blackness. Tomorrow I will walk more.

When I walk, I am Present, and I do not feel this loss and pain. When I stop, I only think about how I will miss him, how he brightened my world in such a huge way and how I will never have that again. It's thinking of the past and the future which hurts so badly. The now is easy. So I will use walking as my meditation, and will try to think about where each foot is landing, and which muscle is pulling, and how the pack weighs on my back, and one left one right at a time I will move uphill. I will use the rhythm of my steps to dull my thoughts, until nothing but the sound of my own breath panting and the racing of my pulse enters my mind. I will use the hills to get into my breath. Oh please, let there be hills... many, many hills.

When you are joyous, look deep into your heart and you shall find it is only that which has given you sorrow that is giving you joy.
When you are sorrowful look again in your heart, and you shall see that in truth you are weeping for that which has been your delight.

Some of you say, "Joy is greater than sorrow," and others say, "Nay, sorrow is the greater."

But I say unto you, they are inseparable.

Together they come, and when one sits alone with you at your board, remember that the other is asleep upon your bed.

Verily you are suspended like scales between your sorrow and your joy.

Only when you are empty are you at standstill and balanced.

When the treasure-keeper lifts you to weigh his gold and his silver, needs must your joy or your sorrow rise or fall.

 ~~Khalil Gibran