I can see my breath as clouds in an unnamed place on the Applegate Emigrant Trail, somewhere between the Nevada Ghost town Vya and distant Denio.
These are the spaces that I have come to love— not only because they are vast and mysterious in their silent histories, but because they ask silent questions of us when we are fully present within them. Where am I, on this empty dirt road that once carried emigrants to softer lands in Oregon, or before that, trade and hunting routes to a land that once had much water (and that has only waterline traces of that past)?
My partner invited me for a long weekend in this remote place to look for obsidian, which he uses to make arrowheads, rock points, and ceremonial blades. He’s got a large store of minerals at home, but no two kinds of obsidian are exactly the same, and we are out here, searching for whatever the far Northwest corner of Nevada has to offer.
So, as my breath creates clouds and my eyes track slowly across the ground beneath my feet, the questions I ask clients as a Soul-Based Coach guide me as I search for pieces of obsidian on the side of this lonely road. And what would I like to have happen? And where is that and where am I? And when I am in this frozen place, and the road stretches to the left and to the right, what happens next?
It’s so cold outside that my running tights and top offer me no warmth. I end up wearing an oversized pair of North Face down pants and my partner’s extra puffy jacket simply to exist outside. My eyes are glued to the ground. This is our first stop of many along the Applegate Emigrant Trail and in the absence of any promising minerals, my attention turns instead to the patterns of frost pasted onto the low--lying plants across the desert floor.
Fractals are something I learned about in my training to be a Soul-Based Coach. They visually represent the idea that, as creatures, we all have patterns—behavioral, psychological, among many others—that perpetuate across our lived existence. By definition, fractals are similar patterns that recur at progressively larger or smaller scales and can be used to describe a partly random or seemingly “chaotic” phenomena like crystal growth or galaxy formation.
Regardless of what you believe, it is easy to see that by understanding these patterns, it is possible to predict or at least, to understand, where a pattern might be evolving. In my realm, it is not an exact science; but then again, neither are the stories we tell. It always circles back to the patterns we’ve unconsciously created, to what happened, to what will happen— and ultimately, to what we want to have happen.
The roads we travel by. The reasons to stop, question, stare and integrate. And how a journey can call us back to ourselves. These are all the unspoken reasons that brought me to the high desert on this frozen morning.
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Pyramid Lake, in the far distance.
Once upon a time, I was a kid that spent summers and autumns on the shores of Pyramid Lake. My stepfather was a part of a large, prominent French Basque family in Northern Nevada that hosted family lamb roasts on the lake’s shores at least once a year. We used to have one of those tents that folded up in the bed of his F-150 pick-up truck, with opposing beds like shelves over the wheel wells in the back; inside, a bright kerosene lamp lit the canvas space, making it smell, well, like gas, but my association with kerosene and warmth was sealed after that.
We toured the lake on jet skis, even riding up to the shores of the great tufa pyramid (for which the lake is named) enormous to me when I was 8, and I wondered what it would be like to climb up on that structure as I watched drunken teenagers do, and to jump into the frigid turquoise water. It was all too big, too much for me. When my stepfather brought me back to “camp”— which resembled a circle of wagons, only some were motorhomes, some tents on trucks like ours— I turned on my favorite music by the Beach Boys and danced in the whirling sand storm around me.
One memory remains: eight-year-old me in a sassy one-piece swimsuit missing one side (in asymmetrical 1980s fashion)- I have a sassy smirk on my face because my mom asked me to pose for the camera, and for once, I was having fun. Like many childhood memories, the rest of that day was erased by what came afterward in a stepparent’s unmitigated anger and an ambush of emotional abuse. In remembering this now—or what little I can remember, which is like recognizing the scaffolding but not the house— I realize that there are layers to human history spread out across every landscape.
Although I have called Nevada home for most of my life, I never came back to the shores of Pyramid Lake when I was in college or even the first two graduate programs or the years that followed, even though I very well could have. For most of my adult life, I pretended these places did not exist even though I cannot remember what happened to me in them. Seeing them now, as a middle-aged writer and Soul-Based Coach, carries with them the power of fractals, these natural imprints on my soul. They call me back, telling me there was something I missed the first time. Now, I’m ready to see it.
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One of many windmills that powered water pumps to feed the water troughs for open range cattle that graze here in summer months.
It is less than 200 miles from Reno, Nevada to Cedarville, California, and Surprise Valley Hot Springs, our destination for a holiday weekend after the new year. For those who don’t know, Surprise Valley is located in the extreme northeastern corner of California. A large and well-watered valley, the imposing Warren Mountains frame its western side. The valley runs some 50 miles North-to-South, and it is considered a part of the Great Basin, which extends across most of my home state. In addition to me and some extra warm clothes, we had my partner, who owns a local bike shop, and our Maremma dog, Freya, a 120-lb livestock guardian dog, who really hasn’t been on a road trip since before the pandemic.
Our route took us east of Reno via 1-80 to Wadsworth, then North to Gerlach (the town adjacent to the Black Rock Desert and the Burning Man Festival every early fall), then to Planet X Pottery, and again north and north and north through Duck Lake Valley and into Surprise Valley which rests along the eastern edge of the Warren Mountain Range.
Surprise Valley Hot Springs is six miles east of Cedarville and about halfway across that massive valley. Given the rising steam, on a cold day, at least, it’s hard to miss. The rooms offer a kitchenette, a bed, and a private patio within which is your own private hot spring tub. Not all rooms are dog-friendly, but that was a wonderful option for us.
What the accommodations do NOT have: internet, wifi, television, or a restaurant of any kind, so for food and drink, you’re on your own. As I mentioned, the nearest town is six miles away. Yet, this was an oasis for me: a total disconnect from my overly-connected life and an invitation to remember, reinvent and regenerate on a much more intimate level with the land from which I come (and become.)
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As a Soul-Based Coach, I listen. Like the listening you do in the high desert, where sounds are faint or not-at-all. Listening to the world. Listening to myself- my body. And how those two interact.
It sounds simple enough, but with the noise of the world, it’s a hard thing to do. Especially when you have multiple roles you occupy: parent, caretaker, boss, employee, director, consumer, buyer, client, person, woman, man, mother, father, child. I could list them all: but each has its own language, its own nuanced fractals, which, as you invite others in, becomes increasingly complicated.
As an athlete, I felt like I was only one thing: I was body. I raced, trained and raced, and trained, and trained, and all of that excluded me in a very essential way from other spheres of human (social, economic, artistic and other) realms. Yet, when you arrive at a place like Surprise Valley, when you have all this space and all this silence, it’s hard not to ask yourself these kinds of questions.
Natural springs offer vapor into the atmosphere, lit by the setting sun. The Warren Mountains are pictured in the background.
The first evening at the hot springs, the sky opened itself in reds, pinks, blues and others in a display I have not seen for over three years. I realized while watching the colors in the sky unfold: you do not need to have all the answers. Sometimes it’s enough to witness, to watch.
A panoramic view of Surprise Valley taken from our room.
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Before dawn breaks, I’m up, writing. I have my notebook and pen on the paved deck around the hot spring. I do not like to get up and be submerged in water, but nonetheless with Orion watching, I am: writing and waiting for the dawn, over an hour away. My partner is sleeping and so is the dog: I am the only one awake.
Constellations are many, as are the sounds when you are in a quiet place. When are you ever and only yourself? Am I, even now?
Silence that was not silence. Silence was the spring water bubbling. The crows nest in the nearby ancient cottonwood tree. The wind sweeping from mountain to mountain. There are so many details telling me, speaking to me, informing me.
What do I notice and why? And where could those things come from?
And always, the work of a Soul-Based Coach to ask: and what would you like to have happen?
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Another glimpse at frozen fractals on the wild grasses in the desert one morning.
R., my partner, Freya and I explore the area by Jeep and by foot. R. is looking for obsidian that he will flint knap into arrowheads and blades because, he says, he is fascinated by the delicate way the stone breaks. When I show him a piece of obsidian I find that resembles the bottom of a glass bottle by the way the concentric circles align, he tells me it’s a conchoidal fracture, which has to do with how the stone was formed, but also kind and degree of the pressure and impact it took to break it.
Freya, a big white Maremma dog, is happy with the frigid cold weather. She’s not the most “spry” dog (I’ve tried to take her on runs with me, an adventure that’s worth another blog post) but given the chill in the air, she seems almost puppy-like in her willingness to run and move around.
She wanted to play.
And I realize watching her: so do I.
I realize with something like shock that life does not have to be difficult or complicated. As human beings, we can find great joy in spending time in natural spaces, with each other with our cell phones silenced, or even, turned off. There is joy in the sunshine (and perhaps that is why so many of my clients describe happiness as a warm, golden light.)
To exit the mind and enter the body as it walks, breathes, senses the world, and listens deeply. This—all of this—is what I have always missed in those office spaces where I dedicated hours of my days for the sake of an institution. Is it any wonder that I have never been happy there?
Sometimes I feel as though this is how we navigate life: with something in front of our eyes transparent enough to let light or dark through, but that keeps you from seeing distinct details. Soul-Based Coaching invites you to take another perspective, to peek around the edges. Or, in the very least, to investigate the very thing that blinds you. Who knows? Maybe finding clarity could be as simple as letting go of something that no longer serves you.
And how many years have I tried to be? How many years have I tried to pretend that I am someone I am not? That I am not someone who is compelled to spend large swaths of time in natural spaces? That I am not a storyteller? That I am not, also, a healer?
When I found Soul-Based Coaching, Clean Language, and Clean Space, I found a way to reconnect to my body even through the layers of hurt, trauma, and disconnection that come as a result of unresolved issues in the past. I like to borrow nomenclature from author Gabor Maté, MD, who distinguishes between “Trauma” and “trauma.” Whether is a capital or lower-case “t”, the point is, trauma is something every human being experiences.
Perhaps this is why Plato quoted Socrates in saying in the famous Apology that an unexamined life is not worth living. In examining our lives, we can begin to integrate our experiences, embody them, and understand them, in order to learn, grow and heal. Contemporary psychological studies point to the limits of our ability to perceive the truth of our inner systems’ functions. While we are certainly aware of what is going on in the moment, it’s not unusual for us to be blind to what actually makes us happy. How else do people “wake up” one day in adulthood, realizing the large house, the demanding career or spouse was not at all what they wanted?
Soul-Based Coaching is a gentle way to inquire into your experiences, diving deeper than their narrative lines (the stories we tell ourselves) and into the structure of our ideas themselves.
The former site of Vya, Nevada, a rest stop on the Applegate Emigrant trail right before 49 Canyon and just after the brutal High Rock Canyon and Black Rock Desert. In wagon-train days, Surprise Valley was a mere day away.
Interestingly, the root of the word "heal” comes from to Germanic word heilien, which means whole. If we understand trauma— even “little traumas” —as ways in which we separate from our bodies and our physical experiences, “to heal” means to come back into alignment with them, to learn to occupy body and mind as one.
To become our whole selves.
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Love is a lesson that nature itself taught me in Surprise Valley during this very cold white winter. I have not been to many of these places in wild Nevada since I was a very young person who learned to associate them with fear and uncertainty. Although I have come to be familiar with the desert’s distinct and sharp beauty and the way the weather can turn on a dime, this was not a place in which I ever felt love.
The obsidian we found in this area was so dark, even the thinest pieces offer eclipses of sunlight.
After a day of hunting for obsidian stone, however, the 120-lb fluffy Freya pup was tired. She rested on the foot of the bed in the hotel room, and I thought about the day four years ago that R. and I had driven to Prescott, Arizona to adopt her. She came from a farm where organic vegetables were grown for families living in poverty unable to afford that kind of luxury; the dogs were the financial solution for what made the organic farm work. I named her “Freya” (after the Norse Goddess of love and war) as a reminder that love can be both sharp and soft.
In the intervening years of the pandemic, we spent many days together, but never once has Freya wanted to cuddle with me. In Surprise Valley, she did. My large white fluffball curled into my body like a little spoon and stayed there for hours. The kind of deep connection and love we receive from our animals is unique; and as my big/little one slept, I was reminded that some of the best gifts we will ever receive come wordlessly and without warning.
There is really no way to prepare to receive a love like that other than to train yourself to notice it, to watch and listen. To receive it with your whole body. To, as we say in Soul-Based Coaching, hold space. As she curled into me, I felt the ice around my heart melting, those unknown fractals like fortresses from some long-forgotten war fell away.
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One of the greatest tragedies of our lives is the way we forget how to watch and listen. Whether or not you believe in omens, symbols, metaphors, or stories— the selection of details that crosses our attention carries as much information as the things themselves. They can tell us where we are looking to find inspiration, love, or hope— or what we are looking for. Are we looking to the future or the past?
Is love lost or is love found?
Do we see ourselves on a path, or have we reached a destination?
Are we on an open ocean, standing over a giant cliff, crossing a mountain range or simply finding our way?
On the way home from Surprise Valley, I spotted a Golden Eagle that sat to the right of a raven, perched on the fence post beside it. Both faced the road and away from the mountain range, both facing the Jeep as we passed by.
The raven did not move as the Eagle took flight. Moving to the South and to the West despite the oncoming storm.
What did it mean?
Your guess is as good as mine. And yet, I can’t help but feel as though I’ve been offered a glimpse of what is to come.