flow knows
I have a hall pass for skipping out on last week’s newsletter. Hear me out. I was at an off-the-grid cabin at 11,000 feet in the Colorado backcountry, hosting our annual Mountain Flow Camp at High Camp Hut.
I’ve been going to High Camp with my family for more than ten years, skiing in during the winter and hiking in summer.I feel more at home at High Camp than almost anywhere except for Santa Fe and Stony Lake. I love the remoteness, peace, and inspiration of retreating to an alpine bowl surrounded by spruce forests and bald peaks. Getting there under your own power is a big part of the allure. You have to work for it. You have to want it. It’s a form of commitment.
This is why it’s the perfect place to practice flow.
But that’s not what I was thinking last Thursday as I hiked in with my friend Katie M, Flow Camp’s hiking guide. We were walking up a day early to prepare for our guests. We followed a forested trail, lost in our thoughts. I was reviewing a mental checklist of worries both ordinary and existential: Had I brought enough electrolytes? Should I buy more tea? What if my guests got altitude sickness or broke an ankle. Would they get what they’d come for?
And what did I know about flow?
The trail was faint in places. We had to pay attention. Cindy, High Camp’s owner, had led Katie and me on a scouting mission the previous year. We walked 20 miles over two days, following Cindy along narrow paths, some barely wider than a game trail, through cut logs, squinting for faded ribbons hung erratically from trees to mark the route. Cindy made us go first, testing us to see if we could discern the way. Cut logs were a yes. Branches laid over paths were an emphatic NO. Cindy saw the land differently, more intimately, than we did. High Camp has been in her family for 40 years. She knows the trails like the back of her hand. See that big tree over there? she’d ask us with a twinge of impatience in her voice. Katie and I would scan the scrim of identical Engelmann spruce at the edge of a meadow and shrug. That’s where the trail goes, Cindy’d say, and I could tell that it took all her willpower not to add, Obviously.
I had to smile. Cindy, with her rugged, mountain-woman demeanor, was schooling us in the way of flow: Look closely, take in your surroundings, notice everything. Be alive right here, in this moment.
When Katie and I arrived at High Camp, I sat on the sun deck with my notebook, lapping up the late-afternoon warmth, trying to get my thoughts in order. Though our structure at each camp is the same—sitting, running, hiking, writing—no two Flow Camps are ever exactly alike. The guests are different, the place—even when it's the same—is always different. The weather, mood, mountains—constantly changing. My teachings, too, vary with the season, the group, my wild mind. This is flow. You may prime yourself for flow, but you can't summon it at the snap of your fingers. You can’t choreograph it in advance. It's full of surprises. You have to keep your eyes open.
You embody the teachings but you can’t tell someone how to be. Everyone has their own flow.
The sun was sinking toward the treetops. Soon the temperature would drop fifteen degrees. In the morning Katie and I would walk out again and drive to Telluride to meet our guests. I had until then to remember what I knew, everything I’d learned about flow, through running, mountains, writing, and Zen. “You know things that other people don’t know,” my wise friend Natalie sometimes tells me, and I know when she says this that it’s not a contradiction to know she's right, and in the very same breath, to not know anything.
I wanted to share the power of impermanence and not-knowing, how being in flow means letting go of preconceived ideas and limited thinking. I wanted us to practice being curious and willing to experience uncertainty. To learn to adapt ourselves to the mountains and weather, not the other way around, to always watch for wonder. I hoped that our time together, unplugged in nature, would bring our group of relative strangers together into community. Friendship is flow, too. I had so many ideas. How would I convey them all?
That night in my narrow twin bed, I rifled through my notes and writings, through the stack of books I’d brought, from which I’ve gleaned a little of what I know. My ideas were scattered all about. I wanted to scotch-tape them into my notebook so I’d remember what to say. If only there was a guide for this, a list of everything I’ve learned, all in one place! Why wasn’t there one!
That’s when it hit me.
Oh.
I am the guide. I have the book, inside my head. It’s the one I've been working on for two years, the one I started but put away. The time wasn’t right. I didn't trust my voice. I didn’t know what I knew or how to offer it.
Now, suddenly, I did. I lay awake scribbling, letting flow come to me. This is how it works. Out of left field but from very deep inside. Persistence and patience at the same time. Letting go while keeping on. That afternoon on our walk, Katie and I had seen an owl and some elk; a covey of grouse alighting in a meadow startled us to a scream. A ferrety little ermine peered up at us with its pointy, inquisitive face. We marveled at the sightings. Auspicious, Katie whispered.
What might we have missed if we hadn't been looking?
It was time to sleep. I knew what to do. I would follow my path and make it up as I went along. I would hold a structure so we could all go a little wild within it. The next morning I would go to a shop to pick up last-minute supplies. A man would greet me at the door and kindly ask what I needed. I’d smile back, saying I was glad not to wander lost through the aisles, and the hardware store man would quip, without missing a beat, Not all who wander are lost.
And I would walk out, holding this bit of magic, this brief flashing in the phenomenal world, and my scotch tape, and carry them up with my new friends to High Camp and we would flow.
go in flow + see the flashings,
xo katie
interested in joining our next flow camp? save the date and msg me now to hold your spot at Desert Flow Camp in Big Bend, TX, Feb 21-25. Four nights, five days. Dark skies, uncrowded trails, desert inspo, friends + oh so much flow. this one’s so hot off the press, details are still being finalized but i know spots are going to go fast at this sexy desert camp. we will be writing on love, desire, loss, and the stories we keep hidden and those we long to tell. COED!
brief flashings in the phenomenal world continues to throw sparks wherever it goes! I gave the dharma talk at Mountain Cloud Zen Center in Santa Fe a few weeks ago, and I’ll post the recording as soon as it’s up.
i’ll be at River Road Books in Fair Haven, New Jersey, on Monday Oct 7 at 7 pm for a book talk and signing. Included in the $25 ticket price is a personally-signed copy of Brief Flashings in the Phenomenal World. hope to see you there!
Just finished Brief Flashings this week. Congratulations on an excellent book. It had me jotting a lot in my own notebook.