Moving Mountains

When we moved to Spruce Pine from Chapel Hill in 2007, I had to put all my cute sandals aside and wear sneakers 24/7. On top of that blow to my inner Barbie, I developed really bad plantar fasciitis (the doc called it plan-tar fash- itis) in my right foot, which because I had no time to rest during the frenzy of moving, became so inflamed I could barely walk. When my husband Pat and I would go for evening strolls by the Toe River, I felt like I was using a new, unruly set of feet; they behaved unpredictably. I had to think about each footfall.

Hadn’t I asked to learn to live in the present; wasn’t this the goal of my most earnest prayers and meditations? Yes, but I had forgotten that most life lessons are orchestrated by that wise teacher, pain. What happened to me? I slowed down, because I had to. I started looking around. Where was I? In the Blue Ridge Mountains. Surprise, Surprise, as Gomer Pyle used to say. Not an Old Navy or a Starbucks in sight. The only chain store in our sleepy town is a Walmart, and it is a hub of homey activity: bake sales outside the doors on Friday nights and Saturday afternoons, kind senior citizens who serve as greeters at the doors.

While my foot was healing I ducked into a store to look for some sensible supportive sandals. I’d been suffering from plantar fasciitis, I told the salesgirl, who furrowed her forehead. “I had somethin’ like that,” she said. “But it was called Planetary Faskee-eyeteez.” We stared at each other. She laughed. “I guess that’s the mountain way of callin’ it,” she said.

I have loads more to learn about the mountain way. It means dropping the notion that a Masters Degree from Chapel Hill is anything more than a certificate proving I have experience in only one domain of life. There are mountain schools of mystery about which I know nothing: like the names of the early and late spring cycles, the signs of a cold winter, the unlikelihood that plants will grow under a black walnut tree, the dangers of eating a mushroom that’s grown on a hemlock.

Who is Cotta McCotta?

McCotta is not my given name. Cotta McCotta is the name I gave to the person in me who regularly loses car keys, misplaces my glasses, gets into the wrong car in the parking lot because it looks a lot like mine. “Oh,” I tell my annoyed spouse, child, or friend. “That Cotta McCotta, she’s up to her tricks again.” She is like a retarded sister personality that lives in my body. But lately I’m learning that Cotta McCotta is a kind of divine being. All that dreaminess, all that sense of being unable to cope with the details of the real world – it’s like a protean soup where everything beautiful, everything creative in my life incubates; formless, nameless, like plankton floating in the sea. Cotta McCotta is that entity, that singing-in-the-blood feeling. She might be that important thing people call a “soul.”

My first memory of being is when I was very small, maybe two or three years old. I was out in the back yard of my family’s first house in Cranston, RI, on a hill, on a street called Woodstock Lane. My mother was hanging freshly washed sheets on the line. The sheets billowed and roared, smelled of soap and sunshine. I was lying on my back in the grass, feeling the warmth of the earth below me. I inhaled the smells of spring loam and freshly cut grass, heard the subtle shifting of the blades as ants and beetles passed through. There was no judgment, no analysis; only feeling. The sky was clear blue. I was watching the silver, winking progress of an airplane across the heavens when I noticed things floating in my vision. They were strange shapes: some like translucent tiny straws; others were things I learned to call Paisleys when I got older and learned about fabrics and design.

So, okay, the shapes were debris in the outer layer of my eyeball, in the gelatinous fluid there. I’m educated now, so I know. But on that day back in 1950, those floating shapes, needed no scientific explanation. They were just part of life. Part of the strangeness of living in a human body on this beautiful, sensual planet.

Cotta McCotta lives this way – floating in mystery, while I, on the other hand, try to function in society, deal with ideas, opinions, desires, obligations, emotions. I’ll be 60 in November, and I’m tired of the struggle between who I’m supposed to be, as opposed to who I really truly am.

I want to dedicate my blog to Cotta McCotta, this primal entity that is me. She cannot lie, because she has no one to convince. She simply is, and I’m beginning to see that she is the wisest, as well as the most exasperating part of me.