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stepping off the path

So, while I’ve thought this blog and this homecoming is about a return to Morocco…a place that grabbed my soul and hasn’t loosened its grip since I met her, I think the bigger thing happening is a homecoming to myself. I have no idea what I’m doing or what will happen. I put everything I own into storage, arrived with two suitcases and my typewriter, which for the record is absolutely one suitcase too many. Even if you think you’re going to live somewhere. I think none of this makes sense to most people in my life, but this decision to step off the path, is the truest decision I’ve ever felt. And who knows. It could be a disaster. But it could also be amazing. I just know if I didn’t try, if I didn’t get on the plane with no plan but to listen, it would be THE thing on my deathbed that would fill me with remorse and regret.

This past year was the most heart wrenching and difficult of my life. So much of what I had built, fell away. So much of what I knew, shifted. I think it was all built on a foundation that wasn’t quite mine. A foundation that was normal and what it “should” be. But not what I am. Not what I could be if I followed my heart instead of the rules. The guidelines. The well wishes. I’m a rule follower. It’s served me well in my life. If you look on the surface, I’m successful in all the ways you’re supposed to be, and yet I’ve never all the way felt like I’m living my own life. I’ve felt like I’ve been playing a part, living a story, but I’ve never embodied it, I’ve never participated in it down to my bones because it’s never really felt mine.

And so, now that I’ve started already…. because sometimes you simply must start things that scare you…like writing a blog….it can become what it will be…. a developing love story with my own heart, a homecoming to my own soul and an adventure along the way…with some reflections on the year that broke me. A time I don’t wish to ever repeat, but one I’m grateful for because without it, I wouldn’t have stepped off the path.

Haven’t learned to be nomadic quite yet
Last peonies on my table in this house
empty studio with morning light. I’ll miss this space
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tea

Six men sitting on a blanket at the base of a sand dune in the Sahara Desert. Just after sunset when the light is still bruised. A fire pit of coals dug into the sand to make tea. Here. In the middle of nowhere. But everywhere is somewhere and this is just my middle of nowhere. Though the more I’m here, the more I feel it’s my center. The light fading. The embers bright red. A smashed water bottle used to fan the flames. Turns taken to fan the flames. Tea madam? It’s hot and sweet in the little glass cup. Too late I wonder about hygiene but that also feels like another world’s problem. They pour the dregs of mine back into the green teapot decorated with enamel dotted flowers. Nothing wasted. More tea made to take to the man who will build the camps. While we sit and they laugh and tell stories. Though I don’t know what they talk about, really. It all sounds like song, rising and falling. I can hear where they will laugh just before they do and then I laugh too. Because laughing in a group is one of the delights of the world. You don’t even need to know what was said. You can simply feel the energy, the buildup, the release, the joy sparking out into the night sky.

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dangerous travel

I think we’ve been taught, collectively, that travel is sort of dangerous. There are warnings. Travel advisories. And I think it’s true that it can be dangerous, but not in the way the state department warns us. We go experience new places, have our minds expanded, horizons broadened. Come home with new perspectives and friendships. But this time. There should have been a warning. There was nothing the state department could have done. You can’t see it coming. Everything changing. I never did make it home. From a very safe, well organized group tour I wasn’t even that excited to go on. And now I’m irrevocably changed. This time I wasn’t even searching for that hit you can get from a new place, being a different person in that place. Feeling new words in your mouth and a different angle of the sun on your face. This time I got knocked off balance by the weight of familiarity. The Berber dresses in the museum I longed to put on. Like they belonged to me, and someone had stolen from my closet. The light in people’s eyes. The sand between my toes. Feeling like I’d been wretched from my home when I rode the bus away from the desert. Like it was physically wrong and incomprehensible that I was leaving. When I’d only just found it again. And it feels like again. Even though it was the first time. It was again. It was home. It was a returning. 

On that bus crossing the High Atlas and out of the desert, I had so many questions.

Can something in the future unravel the past? Can it take out one stitch at the same rate they were made? So that something never was? Never existed? If we know what happens….does it change the past? Give it new weight or lightness? Give it warning?

And now a year later, I am stepping off the map for a while, but I’m feeling like I might be stepping off the edge of the world. Like it’s the end. And it makes me sad. And nervous. And it’s completely unavoidable. Unless I want to stay. Which is saying I want to be stagnant. I relinquish any magic or stardust. That I’m ok with that. And I’m not. Anymore. I need to step off the edge. I am going to leave as one person and come back as another. And I don’t know who she is yet. And I’m excited to meet her. And I don’t think she will fit into any piece of my life I know now. And that is a death and I’m nervous to mourn it, but I’m already feeling it creep around me like fog.

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the pod

Written in Morocco January 2024 on a six-week trip

Before I left for Morocco for what feels like the big time. The long time. The what am I doing with my life time. I talked to Jacque, as I like to call her now: my intuitive. She didn’t have much to say this time. The first time it was nonstop details and stories and familiar ties and have you been around camels lately? Past lives and ended contracts. This time she didn’t have much to say. I asked if she could see my family in Morocco and she said yes but didn’t elaborate and I didn’t have the wherewithal to ask any further questions. She just wants to talk to me in February when I get back. Said this a few times, which is hitting me differently here. I wonder what she saw that she has nothing to tell me until after. after what. What am I going to do/learn/become?

Anyway, she tells me before I go…to find a rock or a feather or something from my garden. My intuition will tell me what to take. And to pray on it, to carry it around, to infuse it with me basically. Then when I get to the desert… she didn’t say desert, but I think that’s what she meant by “there” as the desert is now my there …to have a ceremony where I ask my spirit guides what’s next. Can I have my soul’s next download? I’m ready. I’m ready for the next chapter, the next page. And to take something from Morocco. To leave my rock or whatever as a blessing to Morocco, but to take something home so the balance is not off. I finally decided to take my favorite clay seed pod I made in a class. I carry it everywhere, to work, to bed. It’s been my companion.

Now in Morocco, I’ve been looking around wondering what I’m going to take from here because there are lots of options, but nothing feels right. Lying in bed one morning, I decided I don’t need to have a ceremony in order to ask, I can ask from my bed, I can ask from wherever I am because I think they must always be with me. My spirit guides. I lay there and feel my questions, feel my connection, feel my longing. That morning after deciding I don’t have to have a ceremony, I’m dancing in my garden, in the dunes, in the sand, in the middle of the desert. My foot gets cut. Wondering what was so sharp in this ocean of sand, I reach down to discover and unbury a rock. I wouldn’t have seen it if it hadn’t cut me because it was completely submerged. I pick it up and am taken aback because it is the twin of the pod I brought. The same shape, the same textures, same weird five sides, same black dots. The twin. So, I KNOW this is what I’m supposed to take with me home again. I only found it by dancing in my garden, because I was so happy to be in the desert. In the spot my heart somehow knows.

Someone said to clean out your photos on your phone it’s less daunting to go to the day it is and just delete the ones you don’t want from that one day. Since I have time, I’m going through deleting things from the month of January. Do you know what day I made the clay pod? From the scraps of all my projects and I only made it because I was done before everyone else? The exact day one year from the day I found the twin pod in the desert where I was dancing in front of my house that I never want to leave. The fucking same day a year later. So, it’s just magic…that the universe lay that breadcrumb…one year later I would find the exact pod as a rock. In the Sahara. Where I had never been, but in between the bookends of the pod and the rock, discovered my soul knows the land there. Now I’m wondering what breadcrumbs is the universe laying today? What is coming? I don’t know, but I think it’s magic. It’s all magic if we tune in and slow down. If we pay attention.

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unstitched

I don’t have a way to explain this place. It’s part of me. Like it was born of my soul or my soul from it. It’s grand and vast and full of stars and wind and pieces of a home I once knew. I feel like I want to open my mouth and fill it with sand so every bit of it is inside of me. Part of me. Like I know it is. I don’t know what started the love affair with this place. What was the tipping point? What was the moment when it felt like everything else came undone? When I knew I wanted to burn it all down? I don’t know. I think it grew day by day. Until I was in a bus crossing the High Atlas thinking about the things that stitch our lives together. And if moments now can unravel the past. If they can unstitch things that have happened like ripping out a seam. Is it all that fragile? That a pull on one thread can unravel a whole life? I think it can. 

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Hiraeth

A Welsh word I discovered a few years ago; hiraeth. It is described as a longing, a melancholia, an existential feeling. A homesickness for a person or place that maybe never was. I’ve felt this my whole life. A missing-ness of belonging where I am. Pamela Petro says, “So hiraeth is a protest. If it must be called homesickness, it’s a sickness come on—in Welsh ailments come onto you, as if hopping aboard a ship—because home isn’t the place it should have been. It’s an unattainable longing for a place, a person, a figure, even a national history that may never have actually existed. To feel hiraeth is to feel a deep incompleteness and recognize it as familiar.” This feeling lives with me and it wasn’t until I stepped into Morocco, that I felt a letting go of it. A relief that perhaps I had found a place that my soul knows or once knew. The feeling of longing for a place was replaced with a knowing, that I had found one. A place I feel instantly and deeply connected.