Good Monday Morning!
I didn’t know if I would make it here this month but here I am. I have been traveling for a full three weeks so far and I am full with beauty, gravity and the incredible richness of the world. The month has been rife with paradox for me; how much I love to travel and how much I love to stay home, how much I love to adventure, discover new things and how much I relish the familiar, the ordinary.
At the beach I see these paradoxes in their most ordinary extraordinary glory. The beach itself both stays the same and changes each and every day. The rocks remain their humble colors, while the light plays with their intensity, the water with their saturation, and the clouds with their hue. Then, there are these incredible tracks through the sand made by water, made by feet, made by crabs. These drawings in the sand are temporary and vivid. They call out to me inevitably, their lines messages from the earth to the sky, from the ocean to the dunes, from the seaweed to the roses, from the planet to my soul.
One of the biggest challenges while traveling has always been to keep track of my own needs, my own health, amidst the unknown and sometimes challenging circumstances that travel can bring. I started out this month with a cooler full of homemade food, clothes for every kind of weather and a basket full of books. I can often use books to find my center in strange places and that basket makes me feel at home anywhere, but still, tracking my own needs and desires can be elusive, especially when I find myself with strong weather or plenty of people. Living the way I do, mostly alone, constant contact of the kind that others might have if they cohabit with other humans, can be very distracting. The weather, especially wind and water, can override my senses, flood them even, akin to the way the landscape itself can be flooded, and internally, I begin to spin with those external phenomena more than the inner rhythms.
Returning my attention to myself, my internal experience while maintaining awareness of external phenomena is what I call tracking. Tracking, in this case, is much less like trying to find something and much more like trying to follow something. I am trying to follow myself. Strange, I know, but I am following myself into the unknown, watching for the signs that I have found myself in a place that is unfamiliar, new, unprecedented, possibly challenging. When I find myself, a connection can happen. I can be both within and without, not sacrificing my own knowing but instead growing my own knowing with information from the environment. This feels exciting, scary and powerful. Feeling nourished I reach for what I need; food, water, rest. Feeling engaged, I step into the water, sit down on a rock or get in the car and go to the store. Either way, I’m no longer feeling lost or victimized by my circumstances.
I have, at times, tracked myself as if I am an outlaw, a criminal even, looking for where things have gone wrong, insisting that something must have happened that I might have missed. But, in those cases I am tracking backward, both backward in time and backward as in not listening but instead trying to lead by examining the past. If I was tracking an animal (which I am!) and I focused on where they had been, I would still be at a loss as to where there are now. But if I track by listening, sensitively (as in with each of the senses) examining the current moment it feels more like becoming a piece of music or poem, becoming a living relationship, becoming a being.
In this way, I’ve been being rocks, trees, roads, cars, cabins, lakes, seaweed, and ocean. I have been joy and I have been sadness. I have been excitement and I have been contentment. I have felt the weight of so much water, so much rain, so many trees. And I have felt the buoyancy, the sunshine, as I floated on the lake. The paradoxes continue.
I hope this month has found you in paradox and plenty wherever you are!
Love the pics of - tracks ❤️
Beautiful! I have been definitely feeling the paradoxes recently. You put into words what I’ve been feeling in my soul.