While I was on the mother of all hikes yesterday, I started to feel like I was on a vision quest. That I was supposed to push myself to the point of exhaustion and delirium. Maybe my spirit totem would appear.
For a lot of the journey, I was on my own. I kept falling so far behind that 1) the lyrics to “Time After Time” ran through my head, and 2) I could get hurt or lost and die and it’d take them a while to find me.
I was in a group of four, and as we drove out of the national park, it occurred to me that we were probably the only four people on the mountain.
One thing’s for sure, my totem is not a mountain goat. I only saw them as white specks far far in the distance, even though that was the mission of the excursion. My spirit totem could have been any one of the various buzzing insects that wanted to land in my ears. Hope it wasn’t one I killed.
The most likely candidate is the butterfly that liked me so much it kept landing on my (R.E.I.-brand) pantleg and followed me as I crawled down the rocks to a shady spot under a tree.
Do you know what I did under that tree? I peed! On a rock! On a mountain! And thought nothing of it.
Kari Neumeyer 