Our environment can reflect the state of our being. I believe that we have that kind of powerful relationship with energy and nature.
I have hiked Temescal Canyon Gateway Park at least fifteen times in the nineteen years I have lived in Los Angeles. I have hiked in various states of mind, either contemplating a loss or a potential gain. Many times alone, but often with friends. When I had the idea to hike the trail to Skull Rock this week, I fought it. Why can’t I come up with a new more innovative or unique hike? Why do I always go to the same old trail? Despite my resistance, the calling to go was so powerful I gave in and drove to the trail head at 2PM for the climb. I also had the handicap of one seriously annoying pilates instructor who had rendered my legs and butt almost immobile, but I didn’t let that allow me to bag out. I was pushed to do this hike. The connection with nature, my senses, and to get away from the laptop on my desk was an obvious move of choice.
While only 3 miles round trip, the ascent is rigorous and continuously uphill. You are getting to a rock, basically, that looks like a skull. The views of the ocean are vast and wide, from various vantage points of the hike but none like sitting on the top of the rounded dome of the massive rock with eyes marked by matching worn craters. I started off the hike like I always do, parking on the main road and walking the quarter mile into the park. The initial ascent is rocky and with the sun, an instant stinging of heat, but today, the park was contained. I saw no one else. In the midst of a metropolis, the rarity is a hike midday where you don’t criss cross at least five times with gals in Lululemon chatting about their Saturday night dates or break ups.
Today’s hike carried with it the rebirth of of loving myself on a whole other level, and instead of the pain of past climbs - angst over money, men, sobriety, kids, writing, you name it - I was captivated by how grounded I felt in my whole self, situated in the lush topography. The rains had changed this hike dramatically and transformed it into a path that was familiar but also unrecognizable. The typically barren range was full of flowers, masking the dusty burnt chaparral that thrived in the continual drought. The sticks and twigs had their life watered back into them by the past four months of rains. The skinny switchbacks were laddened with tall layers of red and green bush, orange flower bells sagging off of scraggy extensions of plants from the newly moistened soil. My mark, a mile in, is typically the skull mocking in the distance, but the overgrowth hid the view. I was placed in an anterior space and time. I don’t bring my phone on hikes so I can completely disconnect, and so I felt far from any reality that may try and intrude.
In a stretch of dry sandy trail, the sun a burning orb above, and the ocean glistening wide below one tuft of low hanging clouds, an orange and black butterfly soared around my head. The message came to me that this would be a conversation so I stayed there rooted, watching as the butterfly darted close to my head. Each time it circled me, the circumference would shrink. I held out my hand should it decide to alight upon me. We started an unsaid dialogue, and tears sprang to my eyes. I heard what she was wanting to say. We wanted the same, but I was of the human form and she was a reincarnation. She was a floating insect of beauty asking me about my intentions. Probing me. Four circles around my head. Five. A quick dart towards my face. I promise to do no harm, I said out loud between my sobs. Who and what we were speaking of, this incarnate with wings and I, is of no consequence to you, reader, but approval was being rendered. As I stood there, in the circling of the butterfly, I knew powerful communication was being had.
Then like a shot, the butterfly went up high in the sky, meeting another butterfly with the same velocity and they disappeared.
I stood there staring up at the empty sky in shock. Had they entered some kind of time warp? Was I seeing things? I was so sure of what I saw, but also shocked at the sudden exit. Was this to mean we were done, and the transcending of the butterfly’s soul was complete? Another butterfly arrived but I felt like I was done here, and moved on down the path. But not without thinking how magical this hike was. How transcendent.
By the time I scrambled my way to the top of the Skull Rock, and looked out at the endless green shrubbery, and saw I was completely alone, I let out a few loud whoops. I raised my arm in victory. I had come when I didn’t want to. When I wanted to defer back to judging myself for the uniformity of my choices, only to see that this was a ruse. I fought back a majority of hike up the endless cacophony of noises my ever-thinking brain wants to present. Analysis paralysis. I brought the calm essence back to self with the reminder I was simply enough just being here and had nothing to figure out. We can make the same hike over and over, but often the conditions around us will morph and change. We get to have a new experience with the same topography because we are different.
On the descent, a waterfall fallow for over ten years was bubbling, and as I came to the forest floor where the hike met the park, I heard a sound of static that cut through the occasional rustle of dry leaves and snap of a bird’s weight on a twig. I explored the static and found it was the amplified buzz of a hive of bees in a California Oak. I continued forward and soon the buzzing was all around me in a surround sound. Standing in this massive clearing, shaded by the bounty of the adjoining oaks, I was in the fullest sound scape of bees than I have ever experienced in my 53 years of life. Is this possible I thought? Could this hike, one I had judged as so routine, be delivering these kinds of epic wonders?
I left the park floating on air, in an ease that I had found when I was in Paris amid the strolling force of patrons amid shops and delicacies, only with my writing on my mind. Re-entry into Los Angeles had removed some of that placid edge, and my urge to take this hike was my intuitive nature calling me to retain that buzz of the creative soul. I held on to the feeling, as I cooked salmon that night, quiet and barefoot in the low light of dusk in the kitchen.
I would never doubt this hike again. It’s wonders and splendors, even if at some point it is ordinary again.
I will also be opening up a writing class after the summer in September, and if you are interested in a spot, shoot me an email to get on the list @ kim@kimohara.com.
Utterly beautiful Kim! Thanks for taking us with you 💛💛