I've undergone months of anxiety with regard to hiking up this mountain.
Unlike my siblings and friends, I’ve never really taken up backpacking. You see, I have a deep love for the woods and I’d hate to be miserable in them…and hiking with a heavy backpack sounds pretty miserable.
When I heard that there are pilgrimages where you can saunter to an Inn and have a bed and meal and even a hot spring soak…Holy cow, I was in.
Speaking of Holy, let me acknowledge here that pilgrimages are about obtaining meaning from the journey. I suspect, however, that regardless of one’s intentions going in, we all come down from the mountain transformed. Either way, I felt like a good match for this spiritual pilgrimage due to my affinity for forests, Buddhism and introspection.
When I first booked the pilgrimage, I believed I could get into the necessary shape; besides, without needing a tent, food, stove and sleeping bag..how heavy could my pack be?
Turns out: around 20 lbs.
A few months before the journey, I injured my leg and thus I never reached the level of readiness that I had hoped to achieve when I first booked the trip. Day after day, for months, I felt the pressure of getting my body into shape only to have my leg stay resolute in her unhappy stance. My chief anxiety was ‘What if my legs stiffen and I'm stuck atop a mountain!? How would I get down?’
Getting to the mountain was the first step. We missed our train getting out of town. At first I was calm about it…but eventually I got mad…at myself and at my husband for not building in enough buffer time for transfers (I built in 30 mins..but we needed an hour!) Later however, it became apparent that even if we hadn't missed our earlier train, we would have still missed the next one because this city has EIGHT subway lines, practically an underground labyrinth, making it supremely difficult to find our train.
So we caught the next one and I recalculated the rest of the journey to find that we could still catch the last connection! But the caveat was that instead of having an hour to pick up maps, buy a bus ticket, eat lunch, buy food and ask questions about the hike…instead we'd have 16 minutes.
So we never bought food.
Up next…Part II: The Ascent