Fear has kept me small. To give myself credit, I have been doing a great deal of work on myself. Shamanic Practice, reading and study and deep grief exploration. My house has been my cave, my hermit crab shell, my tiny Victorian sanctuary. The sense of isolation and loneliness has diminished from the howling I could die from the pain wounding when my marriage broke up to a sense of being a survivor on a space ship. I had the plant to care for. The plant of my body. The plant of my house. My garden kingdom needed care. And, of course, my plants.
A shelter with blooming walkways
I wrote and published five books, read prodigiously, hesitantly began to connect with other people. The Centre for Spiritual Living provided me with a surety of social contact when I joined the choir. The director Barbara Samuel encouraged my growth and risk taking. From the first session when she said, “Lean into it, baby. Lean into it” I started to find a place to stand, on a stage, singing, in front of others.
It helped me to claim my expressive self. It helped me to find spiritual sisters who are also intent on dropping victim dialogue and living in a more vision out manner.
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And on the 18th of July I made a large commitment to myself. After nearly two decades, I drove alone in a car for long distances.
To fully understand the level of challenge this was for me, let me explain that during the past decades when I drove alone to go to Whiterock to visit a friend, I invariably ended up in the far reaches of North Vancouver. I became accustom to just ending up somewhere on a beach and circling back. It was the path of least resistance.
The last time I drove to Vancouver, B.C. for a visit and stayed alone, I turned around and dove back home crying most of the way. Just too overwhelmed and confused by the city, not being able to find where I had parked my car, feeling fragile.
So I got in the car, drove to Vancouver, negotiated the passport office and headed out across Washington State, Idaho, Montana, Utah to Colorado a distance of 1743 kilometers or 1083 miles or 941 nautical miles. I had my golden laughing Buddha on my dashboard, my tomtom nagging at me from the next seat and my handbook for Naropa Buddhist University Summer Writing Program in the back seat.
The journey across mountain passes, through accident sites, negotiating construction zones whereby the lanes where capricious, passing and being passed by semi-trucks crowding the long stretches of road left me chanting, “You are safe. You are protected. You are in the flow of love.” I found myself talking to my body frequently.
My main emphasis of conversation was to be aware of my physical response. “You don’t need to tense up body. Let go. You are fine. Let go of your neck. Let your hands be gentle on the wheel. Let your shoulders relax.” And it worked! Some days were 18 hours long. Some days I was behind the wheel for 12 hours due to accidents, work zones and various other normal anomalies. But each night as I found a $70 motel, I lay down without any sore or aching parts on my person at all.
First came negotiating the streets of Vancouver. Watching the people standing in groups talking in East Vancouver with their lurching, skeletal forms changed to students with the golf hats, technology wired to their bodies outside like surface veining and then the hearty tourist people in North Face climbing gear exploring the wonders of Canada Place. Finally, business people who were all seriously late. I think they were already three days late when they woke up on Monday. Heel clacking, rushing the lights, texting with head down charging down a street with remarkable peripheral vision on display marked the successfully rapacious.
But the one thing I noticed was that the moment when a smile broke out, the time when people seemed most alive was when they stood together in groups. It didn’t matter what social strata they represented. Three or four gathered on a corner and their faces lit up. Addicts, students, tourists, business people. A shared human pleasure.
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Driving through the border was interesting. I said I was going to Boulder, Colorado to go to school. The ten year old looking skinny blonde guard asked for my keys, opened my trunk and went through my suitcase. Lots of books and writings. Notebooks and shoes.
He asked me again where I was going after he shut the trunk. I repeated my destination. He inquired if I had rented out my house and if so for how long. He asked to see my plane ticket back to Vancouver. I very quietly took a breath and swallowed all of the smart ass remarks that immediately arose and I said, “I am driving.”
“Yes,” he said, “you are driving down. But how are you getting back?”
“I am driving down. And I am driving back,” I said evenly. I was thinking….. hence the car.
He narrowed his eyes and looked at me again. My age on my passport doesn’t jive with the way I look. I am wearing too many bracelets. I have a Buddha on my dashboard. Just too many strange things but nothing concrete. So he waved me through.
Later I discovered an apple had slid under my seat so I was smuggling in contraband.
Making my way through Seattle to the exit was a two way conversation. Tom Tom was telling me to shift lanes, to take exits. I was telling my body, “You are safe. You can just relax.” There was a flurry of words as I moved from one lane to another.
Ellensburg. Made it to Ellensburg. When I was attending college at Western Washington College in Bellingham, I thought the Ellensburg, Yakima area a blighted place. The thought was that it looked like a site where an astroid had hit and left a crater of featureless desert. But now returning forty years later, I found it beautiful.
I wondered how many other judgements I had made in my life were too quickly formed and made from a place of prejudice.
Driving over the high mountain pass in Washington under a nearly full moon, I gunned the gas pedal to pass the endless trail of semi-trucks. I saw one truck run a car off of the road and not even slow down. They wanted to make time in the darkness so they were aggressive. I kept trying to get far enough ahead so I didn’t have to deal with them in both lanes, jockeying for position, scooting past one another, cutting into the lanes.
I was proud of the fact that I just did what had to be done and for over an hour pushed to get beyond the mess of competitive giants.
I was growing. I was stepping up to challenges. I was keeping myself calm and not asking, “what if?” Just do now. Just do now.
