February 16, 2010
“Shasta: lonely as God, and white as a winter moon”—Joaquin Miller, Life Amongst the Modocs
It almost feels as if a new phase of my life is beginning. It began yesterday, with a scalding—a sudden, excruciating burn that I had certainly not anticipated. Because I’d been feeling so bad about Valentine’s Day, I decided to take myself to Stewart Mineral Springs in CA near Mt. Shasta and drown my troubles on Ladies Night. The trip here on my birthday had been such a lovely, sensual occasion that I wanted nothing more than to replicate it exactly.
I should have known better. Sophomore experiences with anything one has placed on a pedestal are generally a huge disappointment. But I was very much in the mood to sit around with other women in a beautiful natural setting and “take the waters.” I thought maybe these world-renowned springs could heal some of my psychic distress, wash over all the depression, anger, and sadness I have accumulated these 2½ years, somehow soften me and help me move forward from this rut I’ve been stuck in.
The drive down was beautiful, as Shasta and several other flanking mountains artfully pierced the sky with their snowcapped peaks. My first glimpse of 14,179-foot Shasta took my breath away, as I’ve never seen it so large and snowy, filling the whole frame of my view. It is a solid, vastly comforting, godlike presence that makes me feel both huge and small. Its generous spirit and snow-covered warm heart are massive. I swoon when I see Mt. Shasta. Swoon that anything could be so large, muscular, and handsome. Swoon that nature can assert itself so dramatically—allowing time and force to burst forth with such powerful cone of earth, brimming with life and swirling with the internal energy of a volcano.
On the road to the springs, cows were out grazing in the field, and young baby calves stared at my car with stunned fascination as I passed them, my eyes meeting theirs in gentle observance. We were fresh sights to each other. They were tiny and still-fuzzy, little brown cotton balls with legs, huddling close to their mothers, grazing away. I slowed down to take them in. On my right was their big open pasture holding an iconic red clapboard barn. To my left, an empty field that seemed almost necessary to allow the enormous presence of Shasta.
As I approached the springs, I noted a fallen squirrel in the middle of the road. He was flat on his back, almost pinned upright, and looked frozen in time except for one trickle of blood spurting from his mouth. So very typical of our world, I thought. Great natural beauty, new life, fresh death—somehow all coexisting on the same plane. As Jackson Browne puts it so well, “With its beauty and its cruelty, with its heartbreak and its joy. With its constantly giving birth to life and to forces that destroy. And the infinite power of change, alive in the world.” [from Alive in the World]
As I crossed the bridge, I looked up to see a beautiful naked woman with long brown curly hair and lovely breasts serenely bathing in the creek water. For a moment, she became a magnificent still life, an angel in the pines surrounding this pond. A sprite.
I was ready to enjoy a wonderful, healing late afternoon, to fully surrender myself to the sensuality of this amazing place—a hot spring resort tucked into pine-covered rolling hills. A chance to spend a few hours in another, almost Edenic time, when people walked in harmony with the landscape and dipped into mountain streams as they presented themselves.
I was greeted by the woman at the front door, who told me that they’d seen my car approaching and had started running a mineral springs bath just for me. “Wow!” I said, “That’s service.” The bathhouse is subdivided into small rooms, each with its own tub and dressing area. The attendant guided me toward my room, and with a few prefatory comments, left me alone with the waters surging against the white porcelain tub. Last time I’d been here, I’d had an exquisitely warm bath awaiting me, its tranquility softly lit by a votive candle set atop an antique shelf. This time, there was no flame, and the room smelled musty and overlooked the Dumpster.
Ah, well.
I disrobed and took a moment to revel in the sensuality of being publicly naked on Ladies Night, with other equally undressed women in the rooms around me. It felt a bit like heaven’s waiting area. After enough water had flowed into the tub, I decided it was time to begin. But as I plunged my right foot in with all my weight on it, I felt the greatest searing pain of my life. It was as if I’d pushed my tenderest bare skin directly into a raging fire. I withdrew it immediately, shrieked, held it for dear life, trying desperately to stop the pain. I couldn’t believe how incredibly sore it continued to be, sending waves of agony up my entire leg. I finally remembered to run cold water over it, but that only anesthetized it for a short while. Quickly it dawned on me that I would not be able to tolerate even the slightest bit of heat near my foot. Not-so-hot springs, anyone?
I told myself that I would not let this incident spoil my time. But pain has an amazing way of focusing the mind. I could only think of one thing, and that was how to amputate the white-hot poker that had become my right foot. I suddenly had great compassion for burn victims, those enduring torture, abused children—for all who had unrelenting physical pain and had to somehow cope with it day after day.
Several large blisters emerged from the redness, signaling second-degree burns. I should seek treatment. Surprisingly enough, although the bath attendant was very sweet, the facility had no burn ointment, just liquid aloe vera, which did very little. Stubbornly wanting to have the experience I came for, I hung my foot out the side of the tub and immersed the rest of myself in some (very tepid) bathwater. I then hobbled to the next room, where CA’s only extant wood-fired sauna held court. I wanted desperately to take in the soothing cedar fragrance, and carefully wrapped my foot in a towel. But as I stared into the previously romantic woodstove flames, all I could feel was their heat, searing my foot alive. I then walked out to the creek, where surely a dip in the nigh-frozen water would ease the agony. But ice against freshly burned skin felt almost as vivid as the 180-degree bathwater, and I could tolerate it for only seconds.
From there, I made the rounds several more times, bathing in pain and little else, then at dusk decided to hobble myself home. I had intended to stay over, but I knew that the beautiful setting would be wasted on my podiatrically obsessed mind. I honestly wasn’t sure how I was going to drive up an often-gnarly pass in the dark with my accelerator foot so perturbed. But I popped an Advil, tucked an imaginary piece of leather between my teeth, and started driving.
As the pain eased a bit, the evening took on a kind of mystical quality. Shasta and the other mountains seemed to hold me snugly, reassuring me with their soft strength, like a room full of huge white pillows. They seemed to suggest that in time, both my seared skin and broken heart would heal. That if I treated myself kindly and with compassion, took time and care with my wounds, fully felt all that I needed to feel, I would someday come back into harmony with a notion called serenity and carry myself perhaps with something vaguely approximating the dignity and equanimity of a mountain.
Mountains possess both great strength and great humility. They exist in Zen-like states where all impingements—glacial scars, erosion, avalanches, the vagaries of human activity—are endured silently and ably. Even a 593,000-year-old peak like Shasta, which contains a center of molten lava constantly bubbling at its core. It is, as we are, simply a vessel, a container for a myriad of states that ultimately don’t mean anything at all—though humans have invested our emotions with all kinds of import. In the words of the Heart Sutra, “Form is emptiness, emptiness is form.”
Why did I scald my foot? I think that question leads directly to another: Why does pain exist? Why can we be going along minding our own business and suddenly be engulfed by a tidal wave of anguish that seems to overwhelm our ability to cope? Some suggest the answer is to make us appreciate the times we aren’t in pain, but that seems a bit simplistic. One thought that occurred to me last night is that pain stops us. It stops us and causes us to slow down and reconsider. It helps call into question the road we think we’re on, and open up to the perspective of the totality. How many times do we say, “I stopped doing that because I got really burned”? Even when the pain doesn’t seem to be apropos of anything specific, it can serve as metaphor for all the other painful situations in our life, drawing our attention toward their resolution.
My friend Paul asked me what was my first thought when my foot was plunged into the boiling water. “MAKE IT STOP!!!!!!” I replied. And maybe this is the point with other sorts of pain, which those of us inured to painful lives are not always able to see so clearly. Sometimes the point is simply to change the pain we are in. To make it stop where we can. To act as our own rescuer, pulling ourselves from the burning buildings of life and treating ourselves with kindness and compassion as we salve our wounds.
