The Crossing

Sitting in another kitchen of an old friend, of a fellow soul traveler. Her cats keeping me distant company for the moment, pre-warming my bed. My friend has also come West to the desert to live, albeit perhaps more permanently, in the clarity of the Sante Fe altitude. The altitude humbled me today as we climbed a still snowy path up on the mountain. My body asked me to go back down, I hesitated and then listened. I do not like turning back, but this journey is all about listening. My friend and I seem to have a lot to say, to each other, to ourselves—I noticed this especially as we were climbing—there was not enough air for it all to be spoken in words.

The crossing of Tennessee, Arkansas, Texas, and New Mexico has also been humbling. It is fast and slow. My body is seated at a desk hurtling through space at 75 miles an hour (that is the speed limit folks). The work memos served up to me here by my boss-lady psyche Monday were the things I have not resolved in myself, or that I left imperfect, the panic of the solo female traveler who is an explorer at heart but also a cautious coward, everything I have been told I wasn’t supposed to or allowed to do goes across the desk, the sadness of what I have left behind, the fear of things being different when I return (well ain’t that the point). Those things go slow even when they buzz my system. When the buzz is too much and mindful acceptance is failing me, then there is the gift of the Texas gas station clerk who peers into my travel mug full of tea (who I suspect has never tasted tea) and tells me it’s free. There is the constant gift of the changing and unchanging land. The windmills and the drills. The hawks who perch on the wiry trees of the desert and the plastic bags that also do, both ready for flight. The moment the earth goes red and the trees disappear and my heart pounds the tears to the top. It feels like balance somehow. I used to think balance was a place where there was peace…i.e. things were not felt. Balance does not feel like that now. It feels like being stretched by extremes and holding steady in the middle somehow, but feeling the waves of all of it. Super blood moon rising and setting in the desert—“land of extremes”. I have a grateful feeling that I do not know what I am in for, and that breaks the seriousness of my mood somehow.

I am ready and not ready. I have filled her tea kettle with water. It is on the stove, blue gas flames cooking it, coming to a boil, the soft hint of a whistle is beginning which soon will come to a more intense, impossible to ignore whistle, begging to be poured over fresh tea leaves, steeped and marinated in this new experience. I am burning myself a little as I pour the tea, and I think it will be worth it.

I am ready and not ready. Exactly where I need to be. I am not behind in my journey and I am not ahead.