Ep26 Life ascension & the ice cave - Pete Taylor

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Luke 00:00:06  Welcome to another episode of the Impro Pod podcast. My guest today is Pete Taylor, father to Ben Boy Taylor and Alice Boyd Taylor, both of which have been on the podcast. We're working in health and social care for a while.

Pete 00:00:18  Started in the 90s and worked in all areas of social work and found it very fulfilling. But I did get to a point this year where I just couldn't do any more. I was burnt out, which is very common. Life is too short to be stuck doing things, but you don't have to that are not bringing joy. And I actually wanted to start focusing on more creative areas in my life.

Luke 00:00:43  Okay, so I'm going to play a piece of music, and I want you to tell me what that makes you think of. So that's any kind of thoughts, ideas that come into your mind.

Pete 00:01:54  To me, that's a real kind of progression. So there's a sense of having been on a long journey, but also it was bringing up feelings of optimism, of going with the flow.

Pete 00:02:08  It was joyful, but also with some trepidation. There was something holding it back a bit from being a completely soaring, expansive experience that was a kind of plodding along and steps being taken. Also a sense of that being held back somewhere and not surrendering to a full, joyful expression.

Luke 00:02:36  So I'd like you to tell me a story of some kind, and what I'm going to do is break the story down into sections and improvise a soundtrack to the story.

Pete 00:02:45  At very short notice. Finding out my wife, the love of my life, the mother of my two children was given a late stage cancer diagnosis and how for each of us, that was such a shocking. Traumatizing, powerful experience that came completely out of the blue. In hindsight, wouldn't want it to be anything other than that because I don't feel really we have any control over these things, but the level of injustice and unfairness. It really stirred up feelings of catastrophic thinking and brought about such a huge change to our direction in life. It's been a long journey and it's probably an ongoing journey, but a solid five six year grief journey.

Pete 00:03:41  This year, I had a sense that there could be a turning point. The shift was starting to realize I could do this so differently, and that came up from a conversation I had with a friend of mine in the summer at a party, and she said that to me. It can't help thinking you could be doing your life so differently. So part for me was just recognizing the stories that we can get attached to. But there was an awakening, realizing actually there's all kinds of potential to I still have so many opportunities. There's so much going for me in my life. I've got very good relationship with both of my adult children. I'm feeling that I'm living a much fuller, connected and engaged life, something that triggered that. I think turning of the season very specifically, going from summer into autumn this time of year, Halloween or Samhain, as it's known in the Celtic tradition, going into the dark part of the year and turning within that comes with that. But also it's a time of transition.

Pete 00:04:37  It's a time of death and decay, but it's also a time of change and magic. Well, I wanted to say is actually recognizing the potential to fall in love again.

Luke 00:04:49  I'm going to go for this idea, the transition. So going from the grief and the sadness to this potential with the idea of the changing of the season as well.

Luke 00:07:30  So how did that.

Luke 00:07:31  Reflect your experience?

Pete 00:07:33  I felt within that both the seasonal change and most significantly, the life stage changes felt very somber, sad, At pensive and reflective at the beginning. How about transitions? Very joyful. Optimistic. I was quite blown away how you pulled that together. It captured it well.

Luke 00:07:58  I started off very simply playing with the discordance of sense of discomfort and then thinking about this change of season, which brought up lots of jazzy chords, and then this idea of ascending a bit ascending.

Pete 00:08:10  That is a good word. Yeah, I did feel that too.

Luke 00:08:18  So would you like to tell me another story?

Pete 00:08:20  It was one of my first experiences of trekking high altitude in the Himalayas.

Pete 00:08:26  It was on the Langtang Valley trek long before it became really popular. This was still in the mid 80s, so it's quite a remote trek. And there weren't the roads that are there now and only the simplest of accommodation. I didn't have a guide. I was following a very simple map, and my aim was to get to some remote shepherds huts that had been told about, and beyond that it was a village. It must have been above 4500m. So really feeling the altitude and the out of breath that comes with that, but also a wonderful sense of actually feeling quite high, literally and metaphorically. I got to a point where the shepherd's huts should have been and there was nothing there. And I looked closely at the map. It's oh yeah, there's just a path that this bit looked like about a kilometre away. I spent about two hours scrambling up these big boulders and rocks that got to the top. And this is where the place that I was going to spend the night, the settlement should have been.

Pete 00:09:32  It was like a desolate moon landscape, and I just had an overwhelming sense that I'm completely lost here. I'm a long walk from the village. I just left, the light was beginning to fade, and I didn't have a tent or anything because I was staying in lodges. I was wandering in circles at the top and completely slipped up and landed on my backside. I realized, shit, I'm on top of a solid block of ice. And what I'd done was I'd inadvertently climbed up a terminal moraine of the glacier at the top of Langtang Valley, and I was now on top of the glacier. And I was in a real dilemma. Do I continue on into the complete unknown with fading light? I probably had, at best, an hour of daylight. Do I retrace my steps, which was going to take several hours trying to scramble back down these boulders? Really quite lost. What to do? Now, one of the essential bits of kit I had when travelling. My dad had given it to me as a good luck.

Pete 00:10:33  Thing is, I had a pendulum that I could use when they were important. Yes or no decisions to make, and my head was getting overwhelmed with not having enough information, and the pendulum guided me to stay where I was. And just at the point where I accepted that fate. Look across the way from where I'd fallen on the ice. I saw a natural cave that had formed out the ice and boulders. But when I say a cave, this is like a cave within a solid block of ice. And I realized my only chance of surviving that night because it was going to be -20°C, and it was a survival situation that I found myself in. I was right in the heart of a glacier which I'd never experienced before, only learned about it through geography. It was keeping me warm. And yet outside there was subzero temperatures, wind picking up, and also an extraordinary sound of cracks, bangs and rocks being ripped off the side there, tearing away the rock from the mountain there, pushing boulders forward, I was visualizing the sun as the world was turning.

Pete 00:11:43  I had one candle for light and torch for each hour. I'd like the candle for five minutes just for a morale boost. So I wasn't sat in the dark on my own. But I woke up with a really powerful sense of the life transforming moment. It felt like a rebirth moment, waking up that morning, the sun coming back up. Having survived it and having had one of the most unique, powerful experiences of my life.

Luke 00:12:10  Okay, so the music wise, I'm going to break it down. You're reading this map, you've got faith in the map. You decide to climb up to what is actually the top of the glacier. Then I guess there's a sense of isolation and feeling like you are completely lost. Now, once you're at the top of this and then there's the pendulum decision, and then the ice cave, which has this kind of profound quality to it. Okay.

Pete 00:15:48  I think because it's such a personal story. It worked for bits of it. I've obviously got my own felt experience, didn't get quite enough of the magic of the cave, but I did get the sense of getting lost and the pendulum decision making that came through that.

Luke 00:16:06  Okay, so you got the idea of the pendulum, that swing to it, you know? Yeah. Yeah. For the cave. I could give the cave another go cave. Take two. Was that any closer that.

Pete 00:17:39  Did actually capture the magic.

Luke 00:17:41  That worked for you better.

Pete 00:17:42  Than it did for the cave? Because I wasn't hearing about transition to the cave.

Luke 00:17:50  So what did you get out of this podcast?

Pete 00:17:52  For me, because I've become very interested this year in the stories that we tell and the stories that we weave, and actually having that opportunity to share that story and have it translated into music rather than words, because words have their constriction. I've really enjoyed that way of communicating. So me telling a story in words and hearing that being interpreted in a musical way.

Luke 00:18:18  Thank you very much for being on the podcast.

Pete 00:18:20  Thank you Luke. Really appreciated it.

Luke 00:18:22  Join us next week for another episode of Improv Pod. Thanks for listening.