An Overview: Great Life Journeys (mine)

So, after many months and years even of being stuck, world-shy, alone, I am finally ready to move out of my head. I suppose I should explain and any explanation has to begin with a journey.

There are great journeys in life and then there are times when you simply move across the earth and nothing really changes. There are also journeys inward (through consciousness) or outward (across the earth). Great journeys tend to combine elements of both inner and outer movements to completely restructure the psyche of the traveler and the world through which she travels.

I have been a journeyer for much of my life. Really, when I was 3 months old, my parents and their two best friends bundled me, themselves and some stuff into an orange VW rabbit with no reverse and plywood for the back seats and drove from downeast Maine to southwestern Ohio. My first road trip. Most of my childhood was spent back and forth between these places, following the seesawing ideals and hard realities of hippie parents -- the dreams for a better world, a life of redemption, a defining moment in the history of this country.

When we finally settled for longer than a few years, it was in southeastern Ohio, in a little podunk town with few redeeming qualities. I was 10. The journey became a journey into the land of this place and deep into the safest places in my soul. Kids at school did not make me feel welcome in my new home, but the land loved me unconditionally. I learned about growing food in this more hospitable Zone 5 climate, I learned that fruit grew on trees and not just on scrubby carpets of blueberry bushes, I learned how to milk a cow (and how to love fresh cream and milk) and I learned about the sometimes violent "circus tricks" that make new babies come into the world -- this from the horses in my life, not the people. I learned about clear-cutting forests as the forest behind our house disappeared in less than a week. I also learned that my family was poor and that we were different somehow than everyone else in our small little town.

I went inside my self and spent a long time there -- not trusting my self, my family or the world around me.

Later, at 16, I traveled to Idaho to live and work with my Aunt. A journey of epic proportions for my shy, distrustful, withdrawn self. I climbed Table Mountain, in the Teton Range and learned again to trust myself, the world and maybe even my family. The land once again drew me in, offered itself to me unconditionally and I was in love, alive, whatever. I do not think it a coincidence that I had this experience in a mountain range named for the most nurturing anatomical feature of the female of our species.

Later, I traveled to the west again, Idaho, Utah, Arizona (even a short foray into Mexico), California, Oregon and back to Ohio by car. This was not a great journey, but that is another story. New Orleans (pre-Katrina), Maine, New York, Pennsylvania, Kentucky, Illinois, Tennessee -- none of these were great journeys either, not even really worthy of other stories.

In 2000, I traveled during my last quarter of college to Ecuador. We arrived in early April but my journey did not begin until Easter Sunday, sitting in the cathedral in the Plaza de Armas in Cuenca. I don;t know why I went there. My catholic upbringing never stuck, but for some reason there I was, sitting in this gorgeous stone room with sweeping ceilings, huge stone columns with soft edges, light streaming through the high stained glass windows, waiting for mass to start. The organ began to play and the sound echoed around the gigantic room and resonated deep into my soul. I knew then that I had come there for this -- not for the words that would later fall, like rote, from the priest's dry uptight lips. It was for this sound that vibrated deeply into my bones and made me cry like a baby.

Later, I returned to Ecuador with an almost stranger who is now a best friend. That journey began with me quitting my job to travel aimlessly along the spine of the Andes with Jacob, the stranger turned friend. That's another story, too which goes from Ecuador to Peru to Chile to a complete awakening of my political self. More on that later.

The most recent journey has taken me inside again, to deep dark places where memory and pain live accompanied by a chorus of repressed emotions related to growing up the 'hero child' in a family of addicts. This is most definitely a long story and a tangent I will come back to again and again. As one of my writing teachers used it say, it is the navel of my dream. The thread that winds its way through my entire life, touching every part of the story that will unfold here.

After several years of alternately inhabiting those deep dark places and working so hard I never have to see them, I am finally ready to take that thread and begin to follow it back through the layers even as I also use it to weave a new life for myself.