“So in effect I’m going through a time of tectonic inner shift. I was in a relationship for 2 years – or almost, 2 in January – and we literally JUST broke up. I needed to be alone again, and I effectively had to cut out my own heart to shed the gravity and resurface. He’s been in utter agony and it’s a hellscape. He wanted forever despite my continued reminders that I as a person CANNOT do that. He wanted children and he knew that I am the un-mother, and as much as I love my son (currently 4), I hate the role of mother and I would never do this again. I wanted to end it slowly, but I realized that when hunting you don’t wound an animal and then let it limp through the forest until it gives up the will to live. You kill it with a clean shot, with dignity and respect. Still, it’s still a death and I’ve never been so helplessly sad.
I was in a bad car crash about 9 months ago and had post-concussion syndrome and suicidal depression, and it was the darkest time of my recent life. He took me out to climb my first small mountain and it transformed me. I summited like 35 peaks this year. Every mountain I climb at some point I feel like I can’t do it, or I feel frightened to the point of breathlessness by wildlife or exposure or whatever the challenges might be. I’ve been caught out in such fearsome storms that it was as though the mountain had found me in her bedroom uninvited, and sent a maelstrom down over my head to punish me. I ran into a Grizzly early in the season and for months every time I closed my eyes all I could see were the black eyes of that bear staring into mine, only two meters away. I had a terrifying fall from the backside scramble of Cirque peak and I went flying down the mountain on my stomach, digging my poles into the sand and scree to try and slow my descent as I went hurtling toward the cliff bands below. Mountaineering has been like exercises in controlled trauma. I often have nightmares after a tough climb, and it has been the most brutally challenging thing I’ve personally done physically or mentally, but it’s carved out my inner landscape like a glacier.
He and I had planned a lot of hikes to do together, but I found that I was so much stronger when he wasn’t there to help me. Now I’ll do them alone. This year has been so much a time of tapping into my masculine energy. The Rockies are so masculine, and clambering on top of them is an undeniably masculine act. I’d never before seen a buck deer or moose before – this year I’ve crossed paths with 6. I intend to take a mountaineering course next spring/summer and learn how to work with ropes and ice-axes for self-arrest on glacier traverses. I feel very powerful in the mountains, but at the same time deeply deeply by their size and unpredictable power.
I have 11 tattoos and 7 of them are space-themed. More than any images in the world I relate with images and metaphors of space, the ordered chaos, the inevitable entropy, the nuclear fusion of what’s in you and the inevitable collapse into neutronic transformation. The supernova which makes dense energy into something expansive and exquisitely beautiful. I want to be an astronaut in my life. Not cold and alone, but an explorer. I want lots of loves, I want textures under my palms and colors in my eyes. I want to taste the mouth of every powerful gravity that draws me in, and wrap my legs around each irresistible alchemy.“
– Stefanie, November 2017
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This letter literally blew my mind and inspired me into this emotionally strong collection. I have so much words to share … but think I’ll just leave it as it is.
(Music credit: Under the Tongue – Damien Rice)
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