A Year of Magic - part 1

One year ago today, and 6 1/2 weeks before my  60th birthday, I got in the car and headed west.

(For Newcomers - although I had no plans to go anywhere, someone serendipitously showed up to rent my house. So I headed for CA - a long time dream - without a place to live or, really, the means to live there.)

I want to honor this amazing year by sharing a little of the fun, amazing times and learning I've experienced along the way. Since there's so much, I'm going to share in parts.

Right up front, I'll tell you that one of the things I've learned is how much I love my home, at a deep, heart level (lest any of you think what you read means I'm not coming back!)
Here's something else I learned (with more to come):

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It's Never Too Late for An Adventure

With my fatigue and other challenges, life has felt considerably contracted in the last several years. If you had told me I would up and move across the country within 2 months I would have laughed. Impossible. I simply did not have the physical, mental or emotional resources to tackle something like that. There are several errors in this line of thinking, as it turns out, but more on that in a later entry. From where I sit now, I can say from experience that it is truly NEVER too late for an adventure.

By the time I got in the car, I was so exhausted from consolidating 30 years of accumulated stuff into a reduced space, as well as from all the work/challenges that come with renting a property for the first time, that I was literally numb. I could not even feel relief, nor could I feel the emotional impact of leaving my friend, Sara, that morning. I just got in the car and put it into drive. None of it seemed real. I just knew what I needed to do next - head toward Burlington. And I know the way to Burlington like the back of my hand so nothing was different from any other day (well, except for a car full of what I thought were the things I MUST have to live for 9 months)..............until about an hour and a half into the trip when I took the first turn in NY State I'd never taken before. For all our fear of the unknown, it has incredible activating power. I literally felt my cells begin to wake up. I slowly became aware of myself - first as my body in the car, on a road trip.

A word about road trips. I only realized in the last 5-10 years that I love road trips - particularly when I'm alone. Just going to my mother's in Maine I can feel a shift, somewhere past Hardwick, where I feel myself on my way, and the excitement kicks in. I think it must be the point where I let go of everything I’ve done to prepare for the trip, everything I had forgotten I needed to do which made my departure 3 hours later than planned, and everything I remembered once in the car that it was now too late to do; and begin to turn my attention toward where I’m going.  In order to make that transition from past to future, I need to pass through the present. Like all moments in the present, there is an activation, an awareness, an aliveness.

So the moment I pulled onto that unknown road, stepped away from a month of non-stop running/organizing/packing/cleaning/dealing, and into my body in the car… in that moment I felt the shift. It came upon me slowly, thank God. I don’t think I could have withstood the impact of what I had just done if it had hit me all at once. The first sign was, as I said, my cells beginning to quiver with a little familiar excitement. I guess I’d been too busy to realize I would be taking the mother of all road trips; for me, anyway.

From then on that feeling started to grow. I knew I would have some recovering to do so I really wanted to get to Rochester, my first destination, before dark and before my exhaustion hit. I didn’t quite make it before dark but my host (airbnb) was not only kind and gave me lots of space to just crash, it turned out she had some magic to share as well. She had not only been on her own journey (and spoke my language), which she waited to share till I'd had a good night's sleep, she also had her own representative mascot (created with her own hands and psyche), and recognized Sacred and Sassy right away!! She was completely supportive of and inspired by my journey and it felt like such an auspicious beginning. How did I happen to land at her particular house, of all the airbnb possibilities in Rochester?

OK, here I am today, sitting on the balcony amidst the ancient oaks  that grace my current home.
With so much gratitude, and looking forward to the next installment.

Here's to adventure!

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