August 12, 1986
Day Two, Morning
God, it’s hard.
My mind is slowly dying. This death should be cause for celebration, for this mind is a prison; instead, I
feel some apprehension, because it is also a familiar home. I can feel it withering away and calling for
help. When it undergoes one of its death throes, I feel pain, restlessness, unbearable anxiety. When it is
still, I feel moments of peace and serenity. These two modes of being are interspersed randomly through
the hours, so that at moments I am mildly bored or depressed or agitated and at other moments, I am
keenly alive, excited, fully present in the moment. I feel like Jeckyll and Hyde. There is no rhyme or
reason to the moods. The desert and the mountains are indifferent to either.
This morning, I watched a couple of red-tailed hawks engaged in a mating dance over the basin. They
would float on their separate flight paths, come together for a moment, and tumble head over talons for a hundred feet before recovering and repeating the ritual. Each glided so effortlessly against the hazy
morning sky. I felt a touch of envy. I followed their dance for a long time out over Fish Lake Valley and
back to the Basin. I suppose my admiration for these hawks betrays my values and carries symbolic
overtones of the way I would like to live my life — gracefully, effortlessly, full of trust for the currents and
the thermals of the skies. A name in the Indian tradition could help me remember and aspire to these
traits; I take this name, then – Soaring Hawk – from the intuition at hand.
Took a couple of short day hikes this morning. Strength is fading rapidly — tired from less than a mile’s walking. I will have to restrict my activity until I am done here.
“Done here”. The idea represented by those two words is something I return to again and again for comfort, like a homesick kid at a first summer camp. I can eat again when I’m “done here”. Maybe I’ll get a good night’s sleep after I’m “done here”. God, I’m bored; it’ll be nice to catch up with the world when I’m “done here”. It’s the discomfort I feel that has made this obsessive idea my constant lodestar. I recognize this fully, and I’ll have to be on guard against it. I keep feeling crazy, impulsive urges to abandon this stuff, to pack up, walk down, eat something, hike out, drive to Bishop, have a pizza, and be done with the Whites. Nothing is keeping me from doing so except self-discipline. Mind over matter. An exercise for the will-power. One more day in the Whites.
I keep thinking of food. I’m so hungry. Pizza, hot dogs, onion rings, Mexican food, cookies, bread, milk, French fries, and hamburgers. I will probably stuff myself when I am done here. For now, I must be patient and wait. This is my hardest lesson; it always has been. Perseverance and patience.
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