Month: October 2023

When C.S  Lewis wrote Surprised by Joy in 1956, he meant the title to be a double entendre. The first meaning was about the ecstasy he felt in religious experience, a sort of ode to how Christianity saved his life. The second had to do with his wife, Joy, whom he, a confirmed bachelor, married in his 50s. Joy died of cancer only 4 years later. Lewis was devastated, but held onto his love and joy in her memory.

For me that feeling of experiencing such joy is something that’s very dear to my heart.  I hope that everyone experiences those moments of great happiness, the kind of powerful emotion that rises up from the belly and explodes in your head with a rush of dopamine. Science tells us that it’s simply a neurological experience.  And it is.  But it’s so much more than that.  One of the sorrows of Alzheimer’s, dementia, and other neurological diseases is the loss of the ability to feel happiness.

However, one of the wonders of being surprised by joy is the way it can creep up on you in the funniest ways. It can be a religious ecstasy, it can be from psychedelics. It can happen out in nature, it can be from a scene in a movie, a favorite food or smell.

I  think that it’s possible that as we get older, being in a state of joy might occur less and less. Perhaps.  Our brains change, for sure, but science also tells us that our brain may not be degenerative after all, but constantly creating new paths of experience, if we only let it.  Maybe because as we age, we have more and more repetitive things happen to us, and there’s less and less that’s “new”.  So it’s possible, for example, that a lot of older folks do more traveling not just because they’re retired and can, but also to discover new experiences and stimulate that old feeling of pleasure.

As for myself, my life certainly has had more than my share of incredible moments of being surprised by joy. Singing Handel’s Messiah in a small church in New Hampshire at age 18 comes to mind. One of the most ecstatic experiences I’ve ever had, and I am most assuredly not religious! It was the harmony of voices and the acoustics. I spent half of the performance crying more than singing. Peyote and  mushrooms, of course, have also offered wonderful moments of sensory wows. How about olfactory delight?  One time in New Orleans, Alan and I were at Arnaud’s where we were served warm, fresh beignets.  The server put the plate right in front of me and the smell of it was overwhelming; it brought tears to my eyes.  Just thinking of it brings that smell back…..🥰.

Okay, strange. But, for me, the overwhelming majority of moments of heart-stopping  exhilaration have come from nature. And still come from nature. Starting as a young child, it has never let up. I can be standing on a mountaintop, or sitting down by a creek, hiding in a lava tube, drowning in aspens, avoiding a morning spider web covered in dew, or looking at rocky crags above treeline.  Wham!  That emotion of rejoicing arrives.

But the one that’s happened most in nature for me has occurred when I am simply walking down a trail. A new trail perhaps, but even one I’ve been on many times.  A quiet uncrowded trail, just walking along and around a corner and boom!  There’s this astounding vista, and my belly and chest and head are filled with a sense of warmth and wonder and I have a huge, silly grin plastered on my face.  It’s physical. Maybe I’ve been in thick trees and make a turn and all of a sudden can see for miles or maybe it’s been in a dark forest of spruce and I traipse across some deadfall thinking of nothing and kazaam!  It’s a whole aspen family in full color.

The feeling has always been the motivation for hiking and backpacking. Always. It holds me in thrall and has me pushing to go just that little bit further. What’s around that next corner? Maybe I’ll be surprised by joy, right? 

That’s what started me painting many years ago. I wanted to capture those moments.

Inspired by Alan, I began painting this whole series of trails. I think I ended up doing 17, paintings of the forest with paths.  Inevitably the path I painted disappeared around a bend. And that painting was trying to see beyond that corner.

My goal was always to push the viewer into thinking about what might possibly be around that bend. What’s just out of sight? Will they be surprised by it? Will it bring a whoosh of happiness?  I don’t paint anymore. But I do take pictures with my camera and post them in blogs and wish my photos might capture that same feeling. Certainly Alan and I are out there a lot, searching for new places, new paths, new corners to peer around. He’s the one now, even more than me, who says “Let’s just go a little further. What’s around that corner?”  One time, he said “Just another 50 feet.”  And we went, and we found the trail junction we’d been looking for for hours in the Arizona heat.  Just that extra 50 feet did it.  Such wonderful delight: 2 MORE trails stretching off in either direction.  Maybe it’s a kind of addiction: the search for joy. While all the time it’s just neurons, it’s the way in which our brains are so great. 

That brain wiring is what allows us old dogs to learn new tricks. (As an aside, I personally believe that all creatures have the same capacity for joy. I know my dogs do!)  If Rick Hanson has it right in “Hardwiring Happiness”, every time you are surprised by joy you’re creating new neural pathways, like new sledding runs on a clean snowy hill, which like the paths in my paintings, open you up to infinite possibilities.

I talk about this capacity for joy now because this is that time of year when much of the country is enjoying the fall colors.  Right, this minute. I’m looking at a tree Alan calls Marilyn Monroe. She is a huge cottonwood, tucked back in a corner of our canyon surrounded by junipers and ponderosas. Every year  Marilyn turns the most unbelievable, golden color that just shimmers like nothing I’ve ever seen in a cottonwood tree.  We have a lot of cottonwoods in the canyon and they’re beautiful and turn golden orange. But this one, because she’s protected, will last for weeks and weeks, just shimmering phosphorescence and brilliance. And every year I see it and I’m shocked, I’m surprised by joy.  As I am right now.

We are on our way home after an adventurous, sometimes stressful, mostly wonderful 2 weeks of travel. It all came about as part of a 1-day family reunion in Las Vegas to see Cirque de Soleil’s “Love”. To get to Vegas, we packed up Pippin and the dogs on Sept. 21st, and headed to Sunset Crater, near Flagstaff, where Alan was sure the movie Starman had been filmed in 1984. (It wasn’t, but it’s an interesting volcanic crater full of lava rocks and some unique ruins next door at Wupatki Nat’l Monument).

From there, we went through the Reservation, across Navajo Bridge at Marble Canyon, and on toward the North Rim of the Grand Canyon. It started to pour in the afternoon, and when we got to Jacob Lake where you turn into the park, the power was out, forcing us to travel another 30 miles in the opposite direction in torrential rain and lightning to get gas.

All was fine once we finally got to our campsite in the GC. It’s very different visiting the place when you don’t plan to go down in it, but just look from the rim. You feel much more detached: staring at a a giant negative space that’s too large to grasp visually. We reminisced about our last time there with Madelayne, when we spent a week backpacking the Escalante Route.

You can’t really take dogs anywhere in National Parks, which is a drag, but we managed. We drove to Cape Royal, which had stunning views we’d never seen before.

After leaving the Grand Canyon, we went a few miles to camp just outside of the Park. Part of the stress of this trip has been that the whole world seems to be traveling right now. Every place we went was packed. I started looking for campsites over 2 months before we left, and could only find odd spots here and there. Even our usual remote boondocking sites were crowded. And it was very HOT when we left. It’s wonderful to see so many people enjoying the American Southwest, but challenging to see our understaffed/underfunded parks and monuments struggling to keep up.

After the Grand Canyon area, we headed to St. George, UT. It has grown so big, it’s really a small city now. We spent a night at a hotel there, because I couldn’t find a camp site anywhere. To cool down, we took the dogs swimming at Sand Hollow right outside of town. The next night we moved a few miles to Snow Canyon State Park, a place people call Mini Zion, and very worth the visit. Lava Tubes and many hikes can be found through the canyons and slickrock, but it was still very hot, over 95, so our activity was limited.

From St. George, it’s only a couple hours to Las Vegas. I found a campsite in Red Rocks Canyon State Park for 4 nights. It was very basic but we could take the dogs off-leash right behind the camp. Red Rocks itself is full of many day hikes, and we did one, Lost Creek, to a waterfall, but again, it was over 90.

Finally, it was time to descend to the Strip: we abandoned Pippin for a day, and checked into The Flamingo. Amazingly, the dogs handled Las Vegas like long-time gamblers: cruising through the casinos and food courts and hordes of people as if they did it every day. We were very proud of them. The show was as amazing as expected and a good time was had by all.

Enough said about Vegas. We even got in a fun visit visit with my cousin who lives there. The weather finally cooled down. And then it was time to leave.

Our next stop was back in Hurricane, Utah, this time camping at Sand Hollow State Park, where the pups got to swim again. Unfortunately there was a UTV Takeover Event so the place was swarming with Side-by-Sides and ATVs and was loud.

We left early, and landed that night at Coral Pink Sand Dunes State Park: a cool spot, again full of ATVs, and also sand surfers. We managed a long trek away from the crowds and the campsite itself was lovely. I’d like to go back there again, maybe when it’s a bit less busy.

Last night, we slept at a crummy campground right off the highway near Page, AZ. Everywhere was full, except for a few spots at a private concession campground for $110/night. No thanks. This morning, our nearest neighbor, a couple in a vintage Airstream, sent us this picture they took during the night of Pippin under the Milky Way. That made the place worthwhile. We also found a 3-mile hike nearby called “The New Wave” that circled a rock formation of wavy slickrock. We tried to get down to the lake at a place called The Chains, but the lake was about 50′ below the cliff edge and unreachable.

Tonight, we are hanging out at Navajo National Monument, near Kayenta, AZ. Worth the visit if you’re ever passing through. Beautiful free campground, lovely hikes (no dogs allowed, as usual), and incredible views of both a deep canyon and stunning sunset. Alan found a spot to play ball with Clair and Zane while I write this.

Tomorrow: heading home to 4 Fords. Alan’s ready to make more chocolate chip cookies, as we ran out a few days ago and are both jonesing for them!! Time for home!