photo via Pinterest

I was leaving Boston because I needed texture. Something to hold onto again. Running towards the desire for authentic speech, words flowing up through a throat taught with streamlined and succinct meaning rather than stifled constriction. I wanted space from the depths of broken open, or at least somewhere to direct my sail so as to make alchemical use of that transformative wind. I wanted broken open in its wild, unrelenting and ruggedly unapologetic freedom to feel holy again. The California coastline the mirror for my desired reflection.

I sat there on the plane, sweaty thighs resting inside the length of blue jeans, after waking up into a 5am morning scared and dizzy, the way we usually do when we are reemerging from the womb. And what kept rippling up to the surface, in between shuffling through my camoflague backpack, admiring the lightness of carry-on and now fallen asleep ease with which the young man by the window was traveling, and taking sips of water as a way of reminding my own insides I was taking good care of them, was the reminder that when we are taking sacred barefoot steps guided by heart instead of head, it often doesn’t seem to make linearly logical sense.

Pieces of me then sitting inside that vessel, myself traveling x miles West, alone, to move into the tribe of a spoken word workshop and I thought about our universal human connection, the way we weave the experiences embedded into our blood and bone into outward art, flying free on wings that release and make new space for resurrected life billowing back up inside us like wide open lung cleansing skies. While our Spirits re-rise into the community of shared human experience. I had words to unleash.  I was seeking the right space without burdening the places or people who didn’t understand within the confines of a cultured concrete city.

This back and forth of my own wondering, wandering up against the balance between the held boundary that still feels expansive, while being careful not to hold ourselves so far away as to make us feel more alone. We too deserve a container without having to give all of our Self knowing away.

And so I ended up at a hotel surrounded by families and couples, still an hour and a half away from my tribal destination, and I thought I might collapse under the looming weight of its unexpected exterior and rustic opulence which had been somewhat shrouded by a travel website’s chosen photos and modestly inked rates. I felt myself to be a stranger in a strange land. As if what I had been journeying across the country to seek space from was the very thing my arrival had become.