3:15 Monday morning

It has been a month since I pulled out of my driveway in Texas!  Looking through the photos last night took me back to the beginning, then all the stops along the way that I never would have encountered if I hadn't followed my inner GPS and left, with only a vague sense of where I wanted to go, needed to go, at this particular crossroad. 

I chose a Travelodge last night.  The TV is snowy, the Internet keeps going on and off, and the clock keeps flashing the wrong time.  I woke up in the middle of the night just now and looked at the clock: 8:49.  "That's funny," I said to myself.  "I'm still sleepy."

And so, as it turns out, it was only 3:15 and I get to go back to sleep.

Then, when I wake up again, I get to drive to Rone's house--stopping along the way to wave a temporary farewell to the Pacific Ocean.   

I tried to post a picture of Rone and me last night. That picture refused to post, so I'll ask Brad to take another tonight or in the morning.  

I'm thinking this morning of David Whyte's poem that begins: "When your eyes are tired, the world is tired, too."  He goes on in that poem to say that sometimes we have to go out into the night "where the night can find us."  He ends by saying the best words in the poem:  "The world is made to be free in."

When he was writing that poem, he tells us later, he got to the part that said: "You must learn one thing"--and he didn't know what he was going to write!  He sat there and waited, asking himself "What is the one thing we must learn?"  And then the words appeared on the page: "The world was made to be free in." 

At various points in my life, I have visited the night.  Not only have I gotten up out of bed and ridden around in the actual darkness, but I've experienced dark inside myself.  I know it will lift, it always does, but when I'm there, it's like being inside a black cloud: can't see clearly, can't think my way out of it.  Only after it's lifted can I claim what I've brought back from that dark place that I couldn't have gotten in the zippity doo dah light.  

When we call that darkness depression, we seek relief from it in whatever ways we know how.  Running as far as we can from it is what some people call a "geographical cure."  Taking pills is a pharmaceutical cure.   Telling everyone we know who's willing to listen is a conversational cure. (I've done all three and more.) 

When I left on this trip, an episode I was calling "a funk" wasn't too far back in the rearview mirror.  I wasn't running from it, I was just following my intuition: that I'd reached a place that needed space around it for a while.   Even in the odysseys we've all read about, every journey starts out at a crossroad, even though we don't always know it, and the questions that are looming: now what? which road for the next chapter of my life?

Just as traveling with a friend is a great way to nourish that particular and unique friendship, traveling solo is a way to nourish friendship with our own selves.  At times, I actually overhear myself talking out loud to myself--like a good parent, like a best friend.  "It's okay," I say, "You're not lost at all. You're doing just fine." 

When I hear the other voices--equally present in my psyche--I have time to ask: where did that come from?  Who said that?   If the words are  not in accord with freedom (since that's what the world was made for)--I can see those mischievous voices for what they are and send them on their way, hopefully to permanent silence.

After Frost's poem, "The Road Not Taken," the second-most often-echoing poem in my mind is Mary Oliver's "Wild Geese"--the one that begins: "You do not have to be good...."

Since that line alone contradicts everything every one of us grew up thinking was the main requirement of being a human being, it's radical.  Radical: tears at the roots of.  To hear someone say, "You do not have to be good"--shakes up everything, turns us around in our tracks.

Since kindness infuses every poem of Mary Oliver, we know she's not telling us to turn into scoundrels or to neglect the best in ourselves; instead, she's shaking our tree a little, like the wind shakes the sycamore trees with the golden leaves, the ones that grow so profusely in certain parts of California.  

If the first half of every life is devoted to learning how to be good and responsible, a good citizen of the world, the second half seems to be a time of letting go of what used to fit but doesn't any more.  The sycamore doesn't go away; it just lets go of its leaves in beauty and freedom.