Leaving

This time it was my mom and friends, some old and some new. They took photos of us as we loaded up and drove off on our maiden voyage, but i should have taken a shot of them looking back at us as the door folded shut. The image stayed with me all day because it accompanied a feeling I know intimately: the sweetness and pain of leaving. 

Skeets and Phoenix about to take the plunge. 

Not everyone is always compelled to be leaving, and even less actually follow through with the act. It certainly requires an amount of privilege and opportunity to travel and explore but it also demands humility, flexibility and humor. It is not these qualities that many people lack, but the willingness to leave the comfortable, no matter how unsatisfactory, and face the unknown. Travel and deep communion with nature have made me this woman- someone unwilling to stay, because nothing in nature stays. Everything is always changing, becoming, moving… leaving one state for another. And so I have learned that I am most content in search of the next experience that will take my breath away. And so again, although it hurts, I leave my mom, my friends and my beautiful farm to reconnect, grow and change. I need to meditate on my future, on how I want my son to grow, on what I want for my relationship and on where I might like to start a new project. And the best place to find answers has always been in the silence of my mind made possible by the impossible beauty and magnitude of the great outdoors. 

World School is back in session. 

Our home for the night is Balmorhea State Park, home to a beautiful manmade pool filled by the cleansing waters of the San Solomon Spring, “The Oasis of West Texas”. The spring flows prolifically; a lake was created in town to hold the overflow. Mescalero Apaches held the spring sacred but eventually the colonizers came and did what they do and for a century after the water was used to irrigate crops and cattle. These days the sleepy town of Balmorhea is on the brink of a new frontier- fracking. A few months ago we visited this area to participate in the opening of a protest camp to inform the public about the dangers of fracking on the local land as well as the very real threat of damaging if not drying up the spring. I hate to think that disaster for the spring and it’s stewards is inevitable, but we’ve all seen the greed, the fear, the complacency. I’m convinced that if more folks inconvenienced the rhythm of their lives to visit more often and more deeply the sacred, life enabling places that surround our cities, more us would be willing to fight for their preservation and to curb our consumption to conserve them. 

A couple of months ago we came through West Texas in this cargo van. Luxury. 

The water of San Solomon Spring is clean, cold and pure and there’s nothing like it for hundreds of miles. Think Barton Springs Pool in Austin but in the middle of the desert, a tiny fraction of the people (no beautiful hipsters, just beautiful old timers) with a backdrop of the Davis Mountains. We’re here just after spring break this time but two times ago it was summer and the crowd was still manageable. Two times ago Phoenix was just learning to walk out here…

Tomorrow we swim. It’s always a baptism for me to submerge in pristine waters…a leaving. I’ll leave my former self on the bank and emerge reborn. Tonight, it's baptism by the light of billions and billions of stars. 

May we recognize the opportunities in our daily rebirth. 

March 23, 2017