On day 12, I wrote about the infinite variety of a single place. On Day 13, I wrote about how writing enables an author to hone his senses, see more, more fully inhabit the present moment and the remembered past. For me, the virtuosos of mindful living are writers who embed themselves in particular places. Writing becomes a way of life, a means of crystallizing experience into something hard and pure, enabling them to develop a greater intimacy with human experience than most people think possible.
This is what I want my writing to be. My desire to write springs not just from a love of the written word, but of a ravenous love for life itself.
Over the past two decades I have exhausted myself on politics, nations, war, religion, movements, causes, grievances, the things that most of us take for granted as the stuff of life, partly because news and social media waterboards us with it 24/7; we have forgotten a world in which we’re not choking and sputtering for breath between forced, gurgling intakes.
But the closer I move to local, immediate experience—the cold sunlight spilling into our meadow, the feel of pen on paper, a rich conversation over dinner with a friend, an engrossing book—the more intoxicating and enchanting life becomes. For these three weeks I have intentionally dialed my world down to raw, immediate experience, and the result is rapturous. Repeatedly each day, I feel like I’m in a mystical reverie. Every single thing becomes a world unto itself: wildflowers on a hike, a wandering crack in the granite, an insight from a book. I could fall into the infinite offerings of each moment. I want to pull every thread, follow every footpath. This awesome feeling is bittersweet: the world’s offerings are infinite, and there aren’t enough lifetimes to experience them all.
In the early days of the Internet, prior to its enshittification into ad-congested doomscrolling, digital pioneers “surfed” hyperlinks through a web of unique, lovingly hand-crafted pages. The world itself feels that way to me now, an intricate living web, so much larger and higher-dimensional than the flat pixelated world I so often inhabit. I keep finding connections between places, people, history, ideas, books; I want more; I want it all. I’m starving to learn, to absorb, to more fully live.
Today I wholly give myself over to that impulse. We’ve been pushing hard the past few days, and now it’s time for a day of empty, unstructured time. I want to indulge my appetite to truly learn a place. Now that we’re back in Truckee, I want to truly arrive.
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A couple years ago, while on a backpacking trip in the southern Sierra, my colleagues at Cairn Leadership changed how I thought about “arrival.” Until that moment, arrival was nothing more than a checkpoint or milestone at the end of a journey. Arrival held no intrinsic significance, except as a marker of something else ending.
But the guides at Cairn were deeply thoughtful about every step of their outdoor adventures, which they use to train business leaders and teams. We met at a coffee shop in town, ran through some preliminary introductions and intention-setting exercises, and then loaded up our vehicles for the trailhead. We spent a solid hour in the parking lot, handing out gear, dividing up food, doing last-minute inventories, and packing our backpacks. Technically we had “arrived”, but by the time we wiggled into our packs and started up the trail, we’d hardly had time to notice.
A short ways into a strenuous uphill hike, our guides unexpectedly told us to stop. It was time to arrive.
We dropped our packs in a shady grove of trees near some granite slabs overlooking the valley below. The guides told us we had fifteen minutes to arrive however we wished. That could be meditation, journaling, prayer, walking, yoga, enjoying the views, or sitting and doing nothing at all. Our only rule was silence.
It was such a simple but deeply countercultural ritual, taking so much time to truly arrive in a place. After the frenzy of driving, navigating, packing, and hiking, this unstructured time gave us an opportunity to slow down, observe, listen, and quiet our own thoughts and emotions. We became attuned to this new place.
After fifteen minutes of silence, the guides gathered us together. They shared some of the history of these mountains, beginning with indigenous peoples and moving forward through colonization and development. Then they invited a few of us to share insights from our own private arrivals. The whole ritual lasted less than thirty minutes, but gave me a deep appreciation for the power of intentional arrivals.
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Hannah and I start our day in the coffee shop like usual. Hannah has her own project today: handwriting a letter to a dear friend, hoping to restore a relationship that fractured years ago. It’s a hard thing for her, answering an inner call that she has put off for too long. She needs time and solitude.
I write quickly and fire off the day’s blog post, then leave her to write.
I’m delighted to discover that Truckee’s independent bookseller is just two blocks from the coffee shop. I’m eager to learn more about this town I’m falling in love with, so a local bookstore seems like the next natural stop. Word After Word Books doesn’t disappoint; the moment I enter, I’m greeted with a huge table advertising “Outdoor Inspiration.” I notice stacks of Kim Stanley Robinson’s High Sierra: A Love Story, which Hannah and I both read prior to our trip, a book that I have to assume doesn’t sell widely elsewhere. Obi Kaufman’s gorgeous field guides promise to familiarize the reader with the flora and fauna of the Sierra. Two books cover the history of the ill-fated Donner Party, for which this mountain pass is named. Gordon H. Chang’s Ghosts of Gold Mountain covers the Chinese-American railroad workers who paid an appalling price to blast their way through the granite peaks with black powder and nitroglycerin. A cheaply-printed book, which looks to be written by locals, recounts Truckee’s history. Another book, from the Images of America series, features historical photographs.
Behind this table, multiple bookcases hold the kind of soulful nature writing that I’ve come to love. I spot reflective indigenous wisdom like Robin Wall Kimmerer’s Braiding Sweetgrass; memoirs like Cheryl Strayed’s Wild; environmental classics like Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring; and intriguing books I’ve never heard of like John Valliant’s Fire Weather: On the Front Lines of a Burning World.
I want to read it all. I could spend days here.
Walking through the rest of the bookstore is dangerous for me. It is small, with roughly one bookcase per genre, but the selection is fantastic. The owners seem to have curated the most thoughtful, intelligent titles in every genre. The Science Fiction section prominently displays The Tusks of Extinction by Ray Nayler, a brilliant new SF author who isn’t yet widely known.
I need to stay focused. I select only one book: The Best Land Under Heaven: The Donner Party in the Age of Manifest Destiny by Michael Wallis. Then I leave.
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I spend a little time wandering around this little patch of Truckee. It’s touristy, but I somehow love it. Maybe touristy is the wrong world. This place is a base camp for adventurers, which is different; it just amounts to tourist prices.
I halt before a candy cane-striped barrier when a train rushes through. I’ve never stood this close to a moving freight train before; I note the vibrating earth, the graffiti scrawled on the box cars, the way the train recedes into distant pristine mountains. It evokes nostalgic associations with gold rush history and Jack London stories from my childhood. I stand in a shimmering portal between the modern world and 19th century life on the American frontier.
I walk past the coffee shop and across a small bridge that spans the Truckee River. Then I clamber down the big stones into the shade beneath the bridge. No one can see me down here; I have the river to myself. I fish out my new book.
Two hours later, I’m lost in an entirely different world. Wallis argues that the westward-bound pioneers of the 1840s were living embodiments of “manifest destiny”, the contemporary movement that saw a Providential mandate for white settlers “to overspread and to possess the whole of the continent.” The Donner Party made catastrophic and time-consuming errors, which resulted in a dangerously late arrival to the Sierra. When winter snows trapped the party for months, the desperate and starving pioneers eventually resorted to cannibalism. Nearly half the party died.
According to Wallis:
The Donner Party’s fate highlighted the ambitiousness, folly, recklessness, and ruthlessness that marked the great expansionist westward movement. The party became a microcosm of the United States which, while busily consuming other nations (Mexico and Indian tribes) that stood in the way of westward migration, had the potential to consume itself.
It’s a bleak, nightmarish read, but also a profound reflection on the best and worst traits of the American psyche. The first hundred pages leave me rattled, and I’m not even to the bad parts yet.
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I often feel trapped between my engagement with the world and my desire to retreat from it. The latter feels wholesome, healthy, and life-living, but I’m acutely aware of the dangers of spiritual bypass.
At a personal level, spiritual bypass means the “tendency to use spiritual ideas and practices to sidestep or avoid facing unresolved emotional issues, psychological wounds, and unfinished developmental tasks.” At a societal level, individual spiritual pursuits can disengage people from collective problems that urgently require attention, like racial inequality, economic inequality, environmental degradation, and various forms of injustice.
Today’s reading time reminds me that “going inward” can be a necessary and important precursor to “going outward” again. My contemplative time has pulled me right back into serious and weighty issues at the national level. But today I’m coming at them from a different angle, a more reflective one, with time and space to contemplate meanings.
I often return to a line from Wendell Berry, who faced criticism for “dropping out” when he left the New York literary scene to buy a small farm in his native Kentucky. He insisted he wasn’t “dropping out”; he was “dropping into” his real life’s work.
One day, I hope, I will solve that puzzle for myself: how to drop into the work I’m most passionate about, in a way that still gives generously and usefully back to the world.
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Hannah and I reunite at lunch time. Continuing our theme of Arrival, we decide to visit the small Donner Memorial State Park museum. It recounts the same history I’m reading, in brief but colorful detail. Another exhibits pay tribute to the Chinese-American railroad workers. This fires a hint of a memory for me. I struggle to follow this elusive thread back through the years. Yes, there it is… a John Steinbeck connection. Later, at camp, I sift through my Kindle edition of East of Eden, confirming what I remember. A deeply meaningful connection for me and Hannah, one which will earn its own blog post soon.
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We settle in for a quiet evening. It was a good day, of doing nothing in particular, of simply arriving and paying attention. I have only scratched the surface, but with each passing day, this place is coming to life for me. And by truly learning this one place, I am gaining insights that will stay with me when I go.