Wild

By Cheryl Strayed

Cheryl Strayed’s life shattered into a thousand tiny pieces when her mother died unexpectedly, at a young age, from aggressive lung cancer.  She left her marriage, fell into a relationship with a heroin addict, and began medicating her pain with this highly addictive drug.  Her once secure family of origin also fell apart in the wake of her mother’s death, compounding her grief by leaving her essentially alone in the world.  The heroin removed her pain, if only temporarily, and Ms. Strayed could easily have succumbed to addiction, but something deep inside her wouldn’t give up on life and this something sent her on a journey of tremendous hardship to retrieve the tiny pieces of herself so that she could put them back together into someone capable of happiness.

My initial apprehension that Wild would be another Eat, Pray, Love (by Elizabeth Gilbert), fell away within the first few words of the prologue.  Where  Eat, Pray, Love begins with an embarrassingly endless self-pity party, Wild begins with the sudden loss of Ms. Strayed’s left hiking boot in the middle of a rocky trail many miles from the next human being.  I can just imagine Elizabeth Gilbert throwing a tantrum at the loss of the boot and how unfair life is.  Cheryl Strayed did not have energy to waste in crying about a lost boot; it was just one more crisis in a series to be managed.  So she kept walking, on her already ruined feet, because her life depended on it.   From the beginning, pain – both physical and spiritual – had been her constant companion.  By the end, the spiritual pain was gone and the physical pain had become bearable.  Walking barefoot over rough terrain while carrying a heavy weight on her shoulders was a metaphor for how Cheryl Strayed lived her life until she learned the art of letting go.

When a person’s life is in ruins one of three things happens:  she gives up, she tries to heal but eventually fails, or she emerges like a phoenix rising from the ashes.  The first outcome is a waste, the second, a tragedy, but the third is a miracle of the spirit.  When people succeed in recovery from addiction, abuse, or trauma it takes an heroic effort to climb out of the hole they have found themselves in.  As Janis Joplin so famously said, “freedom’s just another word for nothing left to lose,” and that is what it means to hit bottom.  Cheryl Strayed knew that she was dangerously close to that point and decided to do something impossible in order to stay alive.  Her story reminded me of the Labors of Hercules but nothing in her memoir suggests that she felt like a hero.  She was a lost and lonely soul who needed to shed twenty something years of baggage before she could find her way in the world.

Wild takes us on Cheryl Strayed’s ill-conceived journey to walk the Pacific Crest Trail from just north of Los Angeles to the Oregon-Washington state line.  From start to finish, Ms. Strayed covered more than 1,100 miles, mostly on foot, wearing a backpack and tent.  Unlike Ms. Gilbert, Ms. Strayed had no lucrative book deal to finance her journey.  Cheryl Strayed worked as a waitress and saved a few dollars here and there until she had what she thought would be enough to keep her in freeze-dried food for the duration of her trek.  Even the shortest backpacking trip requires planning and organization to ensure sufficient quantities of food and water.  When planning a weeks- or months-long trek preparation can mean the difference between life and death or, at a minimum, success and failure.  At 22 years of age, having never backpacked, Ms. Strayed was completely unprepared in every possible way.  And yet, she never turned back once she took her first step on the Pacific Crest Trail for what would either kill her or make her stronger. 

Lots of people (mostly women) liked Eat, Pray, Love because it enabled them to “feast, fast, and f(ornicate)” vicariously through Elizabeth Gilbert’s self-obsessed writing.  Who wouldn’t enjoy eating her way through Italy, slimming down at an ashram (OK, there were some “hardships” in this part), and finding amor caliente with a wealthy, world-traveling, and not too demanding second husband, all the while getting paid to write about it?  Best of all, for Ms. Gilbert, was imagining her ex-husband and ex-lover eating their hearts out over her success which their shortcomings and misdeeds made possible.

Wild, by contrast, is so honest it is painful to read at times.  Ms. Strayed shares her worst self and her worst moments without apology or qualification.  She describes the abuse of her father, the abandonment of her step father , the disintegration of her family, and the mercy killing of her mother’s beloved horse without flinching, anger, or blame.  There is a powerful acceptance of formative events in her life that transcends the book and leaves the reader elevated, even though there is very little of Ms. Strayed's story that is enjoyable other than her descriptions of spiritual gifts from fellow travelers and the natural beauty she encountered on the trail. 

 

In addition to sharing her story, Ms. Strayed’s memoir pays homage to the people who conceived of and eventually built the Pacific Crest Trail, a 2,650 mile footpath from Mexico to Canada parallel to the West Coast of the United States of America.  The process began in the 1930s with YMCA volunteers marking the trail but didn’t receive Federal designation and Park Service protection until 1993.  According to the PCT website, thousands of hikers and equestrians enjoy the trail each year, a surprising number of whom hike the entire length.  Given the many degrees of latitude the trail encompasses, as well as changes in elevation, conditions on a given day can range from 110˚ in desert valleys up to 20˚ or colder on mountain tops, with everything in between.  Packing for such extreme conditions would be a challenge for anyone, but for those who must carry their world in a backpack, every ounce requires a decision.  Cheryl Strayed did not know this until well into her trek when the trail humbled her enough to accept help from an experienced hiker.  The author's humility is what makes Wild worth reading and sharing because it holds the key to her transformation.

If, like me, you tossed Eat, Pray, Love the minute you finished, you owe it to yourself to read  Wild.  On the other hand, if you liked Eat, Pray, Love, you might find Wild a bit too “real” for you, although Oprah liked them both, for whatever that’s worth.  Wild could easily have been clichéd and sugar-coated, after all the author did some shameful things before deciding to walk for her life.  Ms. Strayed could also have left out a lot of details about life on the trail but chose to love her unwashed and foul-smelling self.  There is nothing like a hot shower after weeks in the wild to make you appreciate what a gift cleanliness is.  Some people never experience true hardship nor face insurmountable objects in life.  While I wouldn’t wish pain on anyone, I know from personal experience that tragedy and suffering give depth and meaning to life, and can foster an appreciation for the difficulties faced by others.  It takes courage to share a painful life story but only a whole and healthy person can do so without self-pity or narcissism.  

Copyright 2012 Teresa Friedlander, all rights reserved

Siddhartha

Siddhartha by Hermann Hesse

Book review by Teresa Friedlander, copyright 2010


There has never been a point in history when the “human condition” was universally good. Whether the enemy is our environment, each other, or ourselves, human beings haven’t found a way to eliminate suffering in the 20,000 or so years we have been on earth. Even at the height of the Renaissance, the plague swept through Europe while monarchs and bishops practiced politics by arranging for heads to be separated from bodies, villages to be sacked, and the poor to starve. And yet, there have always been a few beautiful souls who recognized that our species could be so much better than we are by being better to each other. Jesus, Mohammad, and the Buddha taught (and continue to teach) how we can find the good within ourselves, so that we might transcend the suffering and baseness of our earthly lives. The world’s great religions – Christianity, Islam, Buddhism, and Judaism – promise salvation, eternal rest, paradise, or enlightenment as a reward for rising above greed, hatred, vanity, lust, gluttony, and envy.

Siddhartha is the wealthy scion of an important Indian family who dutifully learns his lessons and religious practices in order that he continue his family’s Brahmin legacy. The young man typifies the person who “has it all” but one day realizes that he feels empty inside. Rather than attempt to fill his emptiness with pleasures of the body, Siddhartha decides to quit his family and his caste to go searching for a path to enlightenment. At first Siddhartha believes that ascetism will make him more holy, but after a time he realizes that denying the body is itself a form of vanity. He leaves the ascetics and joins up with followers of the Buddha. Buddhists are more accepting of the body’s physical needs, but Siddhartha finds irreconcilable logic problems in their belief system. Weary of his quest, Siddhartha succumbs to the attraction of a beautiful and demanding woman. In order to win her, Siddhartha learns how to amass riches by apprenticing himself to a successful merchant. He becomes quite wealthy and after several years of hedonism, Siddhartha realizes that he can have anything he wants and he can make others do his bidding: his life has become a game. Once again, he walks away. At the end of the story, after following a zig-zag path from one extreme to the other, Siddhartha discovers that the secret to enlightenment is within himself and that only by letting go of people, possessions, and expectations can he get there.

Hermann Hesse (1877-1962), best known for Steppenwolf, published Siddhartha in 1922. As a boy, Hermann was psychologically troubled, prone to tantrums and oppositional behavior, and at times suicidal. He bridled under his parents’ strict upbringing and did not share their Lutheran faith. Hermann sought better answers to life’s mysteries and paradoxes by reading the works of great European thinkers including Arthur Schopenhauer, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Gotthold Ephraim Lessing, and Friedrich Schiller. Because of his parents’ missionary work in India, Hermann had access to Indian artifacts, literature, and art. This fueled a fascination with that culture and an interest in Buddhism.

In 1894, at age seventeen, Hermann Hesse became an apprentice mechanic; work he found so soul-killing that he began studying spiritualism in earnest. After completing his apprenticeship, Mr. Hesse supported himself by working for a series of book stores, and began writing in his free time. His first book, Peter Carmenzind, published in 1904, was so successful that Mr. Hesse was able to live off the proceeds. In that same year, he married Maria Bernoulli and they settled in a small German town on the shores of Lake Constance.

Mrs. Hesse bore three sons while Mr. Hesse continued to write. It was during this time that Mr. Hesse began reading Schopenhauer’s works on Theosophy (religious philosophy and studies of the unknown and unknowable) which were influenced by Buddhism. As his thinking evolved, his marriage fell apart and Mr. Hesse embarked on a spiritual quest to Sri Lanka and Indonesia. While he found no answers to his questions, Hermann Hesse did find inspiration for his writing, and published Rosshalde in 1914.

During the build-up to World War I, Mr. Hesse became troubled by a growing movement of fanatic patriotism in Germany, but voluntarily enlisted in the Imperial Army out of a sense of duty. Due to poor eyesight, he was not allowed to fight and instead was assigned to look after prisoners of war. Shortly thereafter, Mr. Hesse published an essay entitled “O Freunde, nicht diese Töne” (Oh Friends, Not These Tones), decrying the nationalistic patriotism which preached German superiority and hatred of non-Germans. This essay, while important, made Mr. Hesse a pariah; he began receiving hate mail and found himself - unhappily - in the public eye. During the same period, his father died and his wife became schizophrenic. The pressure was too much and Hermann Hesse, himself, suffered a psychiatric breakdown.

Mr. Hesse’s breakdown and institutionalization coincided with the advent of psychology and psychoanalysis, and he became acquainted with Carl Jung, a contemporary of Sigmund Freud. Jung believed that within each human psyche there are echoes of a collective consciousness which make certain symbols universally meaningful and explain common thought patterns across cultures. It is as if each of us is born with memories created by our ancestors which replay in our dreams. Mr. Hesse’s experience with Jungian psychoanalysis enabled his spiritual beliefs and his quest for self-actualization to coalesce. Siddhartha and Steppenwolf, his two most famous books, describe respectively, a spiritual quest and a semi-autobiographical examination of a disintegrated personality. Hermann Hesse found the world of humans to be complex and frustrating and had difficulty making sense of life. While he felt alone in his struggles, his writing reflected the zeitgeist (spirit of the time) which had undercurrents of confusion, depression, and fear. Mr. Hesse believed that enlightenment would change the zeitgeist and thereby enable humanity to advance.

Enlightenment, according to Buddhism, is to be free from greed, hatred, and delusion, and only by achieving enlightenment can one find pure peace and happiness. But what would happen if everyone on earth suddenly achieved enlightenment? Thieves would stop stealing, wars and feuds would cease, and we would accept ourselves as we truly are. We might all join hands and celebrate our collective bliss by chanting “Om”. So far, so good. However, without greed, no one would want to work; without hatred, no one would have passion; and without delusion, there would be no art, literature, or fashion. The world of humans would grind to a halt and we would starve or freeze to death. We would, however, be experiencing a state of bliss. And then what?

There is something very satisfying about the daily struggles we must all endure, whether it is to get a bite of food, to stay warm (or cool), to find comfort, to finish a job, to make something, to sell something or simply get through another day. If we were all perfectly content in our present moment, doing nothing but being, life would be meaningless. And so, we must go on loving/hating, giving/taking, laughing/crying, birthing/dying. As long as we retain our living bodies, we are bound to life on earth and all that entails. What awaits us after death is unknown and unknowable, but most of us believe that how we conduct our lives will send our souls in one direction or another. To reach heaven or to achieve enlightenment requires giving up wealth, comfort, competition, vanity, and social hierarchies. That is a tall order for most of us.

Siddhartha spent a lifetime trying to become enlightened, learning important lessons each step of the way. It was only when he stopped trying and let go of everything that he finally understood the simple, pure beauty of enlightenment. Most of us go through life moment to moment – growing up, having children, trying to grab the brass ring, growing old, and dying. Some of us achieve a degree of wisdom, but most of us live lives “of quiet desperation”. What Hermann Hesse understood and communicated through his most important books, especially Siddhartha, was that in order to improve the “human condition” we need to act collectively to reduce suffering, and that requires that the human species become more enlightened. Whether we can, or will, depends on each and every one of us. Om.