how to climb a mountain
by the magical Maya Stein

Make no mistake. This will be an exercise in staying vertical.
Yes, there will be a view, later, a wide swath of open sky,
but in the meantime: tree and stone. If you’re lucky, a hawk will
coast overhead, scanning the forest floor. If you’re lucky,
a set of wildflowers will keep you cheerful. Mostly, though,
a steady sweat, your heart fluttering indelicately, a solid ache
perforating your calves. This is called work, what you will come to know,
eventually and simply, as movement, as all the evidence you need to make
your way. Forget where you were. That story is no longer true.
Level your gaze to the trail you’re on, and even the dark won’t stop you.

Faith is forward motion.
–Karen Maezen Miller

I can run miles and miles with this thought in my pocket. Thank you, Karen. There is trust in each step, in the moving forward, in not knowing, in believing the earth will hold you, the sun will rise. This is the gift of Africa to me–to see up close how people step into the future without security or guarantee, choosing to believe the best is yet to be.

“I see my path, but I don’t know where it leads. Not knowing where I’m going is what inspires me to travel it.”
-Rosalia de Castro

I wish I could say the not knowing inspires me, but the truth is most of the time it leaves me feeling one part crazy and another part terrified. To not know is our truest state, though we do whatever is necessary to fool ourselves or forget. Every truly wonderful thing that has ever happened to me has come from a space of not knowing. And every incidence of pure magic followed when I was convinced there was no way to know at all.

I’ve always thought of myself as someone of little faith, even though taking big risks and attempting impossible things is often my matter of course. I often think that if I had even a little bit of confidence in providence or divine intervention, I could take on my adventures with more peace in my heart or at least a dose of genuine joy. Instead, I jump, assuming at the end there will be a hard crash into concrete, but knowing there’s no life for me in avoiding the cliffs. Overcome with a resigned kind of terror, I take the dive, hoping for some miracle in the end, but willing to take the consequences if there’s not.

It’s only when I get close to bottom do I feel the weight of the little faith I do have. It’s only when sure and sudden disaster is in sight do I get a glimmer of hope that it will work out after all.

I don’t know why it works this way for me, but I’m starting to realize being willing to be terrified, being aware of not knowing and jumping anyway might be the definition of faith after all. That faith might be…

living in the world the way that you want it to be more than calculating the way the world is.

wanting to take the risk to create a new possibility, just in case something strange and unheard of can come into being simply because you dared to hope it could exist.

understanding you could be exposed as over-reaching or stupid or foolish and accepting that’s worth the chance of finding out you are not.

embracing a view of the world that welcomes people who dare and refuses to punish those who are willing to be confused and disoriented in pursuit of something tender, something honest, something true.

taking a gentle view of your longings and believing that everything unfolds, always and always, exactly as it should with all that yearning held close and not forgotten.

Of course, it’s also possible that these are the hallmarks of mental illness (fingers crossed) but I can think of few remarkable people on this earth who weren’t considered seriously flawed or slightly insane for choosing the path less traveled.

Tell me, inshuti wanjye (my dear friend), what faith looks like to you.

She is talking on a cell phone out behind the outdoor kitchen, a simple mud house with crumbling walls and a gaping hole in one part of the roof. This is where she lived before the roof came in, before she left, before she decided she didn’t want to be a big girl in a little school, sitting in a desk meant for girls half her age. This is where she hand washed her uniform, after she slept, on the pallet on the mud floor swept clean of debris and the inevitable dust.

Do you want to walk? I motion to her with my hands, and she hands me the phone.

Tell her, I tell Odette. We can talk now. Under the tree. Tell her we’re here for her, if she needs someone to listen.

I pass the phone back and she nods, gesturing toward the path. The little girls, without knowing, appear out of nowhere to pass her back the baby who is crying, who is tired, who is needing to know what will happen next, without knowing anything of the future or any trouble at all.

The young woman listens to Odette as we walk along the thistle/thorn bush fence. I try to make the baby smile, but it doesn’t work and then I ask to carry her on my back. The woman talks now, like every mother with her arms full, the phone in the crick of her neck, her arms shaking out the cloth while I hold the girl, not two months old. She positions the baby and wraps the fabric, once then twice, tying it first this way and that, until the baby settles secure and I bliss out, while she and Odette laugh–this crazy white girl playing African while the sun blazes hot across the summer sky.

She tells Odette her story, and my heart waits for the words. How she hoped, how she tried, how she thought it would be different, how she’d give anything now for that uniform, that house, that chance to learn again. I walk beside her and wait and listen, until we stand under the shade of a lonely tree and she passes the phone back so I can hear what my soul already knows.

With Odette’s voice and the girl’s eyes, I put the pieces together. She is being treated badly, but this is not what troubles her the most. She is wondering if she can be loved, if she is worth the sacrifice, if she dare risk pain of asking for what she needs, even if the answer must be an inevitable no.

In this we are together, I tell her with my eyes, speaking the words into the phone, as I line her story with the question that underscores the whole. I have that wondering, too, I tell her. It’s an old wound, but it can be healed. It hurts you here, I tell her, motioning to my heart, while she nods, eyes shining.

Odette adds her part to mine, reminding her she must be loved, that we love her already, that for any problem she has, any sorrow she faces, here is one she must not suffer: the suspicion that in the end, she is always on her own.

Her face softens, the furrow of her brow smooths. She murmurs sweet words in Kinyarwanda and the baby sighs on my back. I leave them for now, the best of it said, the worst fear behind, and go past the tree, to the part of the field where the brown-eyed susans grow. Even so far away, I can see her back begin to straighten, I can see her chin start to rise. She is trying on her future. She is considering the possiblity it might not be too late. She is letting herself believe someone loves her, that in the essential way she wondered, she is not alone.