22: A journey comes to its end

The sun is painting gentle shapes on the uneven brick floor beneath me. I’m sitting outside the little house I’m staying in for the next couple of days. My legs are naked. It’s December.

Stephen just came out with coffee, a full bags worth. It’s his little house, he calls it a cabin - right next to his own house. I think he restored it himself.

- I just realized I brought you back here yesterday, but you had no supplies. I have a little coffee, do you want it? Pete’s coffee, it’s really good!

Stephen was the friend of a friend, and a friend when you needed one. His cabin was simple: Four walls, a kitchen, a bathroom (with a gorgeous white wrought iron tub on lion feet), a bedroom/living room. Every wall and the ceiling was painted white. I just realized this morning that this was why it translated as Scandinavian to me: The white walls. That’s all we have in the north, because we need it to reflect every bit of light into our sun-deprived eyes in the dark days of winter. Here in Northern California it reflected massive amounts of sun back to me, painting the walls every shade of gold and glory. I loved the little house. It was perfect.

Coffee, dear Lord, YES, did I ever want it. I had just talked with Lisa, the pediatrician, about this yesterday, and she had re-affirmed my un-medical assessment: Caffeine is a constrictor. It helps with head-ache, because it makes the blood vessels return to a sensible size, instead of the overblown throbbing highway of brain blood racing through my head at any given moment. And as someone sporting a constant, around the clock head pain, coffee isn’t just a wonderful treat (which it is also, let’s not minimize it’s wonders); It’s pure medicine. Still, I had opted out of stocking up on coffee at the People’s Store downtown Bolinas yesterday. I had figured I could walk into town today and get a cup somewhere, so I wouldn’t have to buy supplies yet again, that I would only have to leave behind yet again, because supplies are simply too heavy to log around to the next place. And I didn’t even have a next place this time – the next place after here was the airport!

But good lord did I miss it. Coffee, I mean. Half of my blood stream was probably made up by the stuff by now. How I could have come to the conclusion I could do without even a little, escapes me. Now a steaming cup was right next to me, warm and freshly brewed, in a sturdy marine blue cup resting on the beautifully laid brick floor of the terrace in front of the little house, my home for the next couple of days.

Home. Not home. But a bed, a shower, even a washing machine, so all I needed. The simple aesthetic of the bare rooms (someone had just moved out), the quiet, and the benevolent rays made it complete luxury. Here I was, in all the church I ever needed: Sitting in the glorious soft sun with my coffee, the rolling hill lands of Bolinas behind me, the waving of impossibly tall pine trees to my right, purple flowers of oregano plants and pots planted with lavender in the garden on the cutest lawn chair of green wrought iron shaped into roses, reminding me of the south of France.

Wait, actually roses were everywhere, they were on the trellis, they were on the little house I was staying in, they were the bushes larger than the house itself just off to my right.

I couldn’t help but smile. The scallop shell was my symbol, my magic. But the rose was, too. Even before I went on any formal pilgrimages, that was the name, I chose for myself: Rose. Before I knew. Before I had sailed along in the white energy of the Mother, the comfort of the Eternal one, the love of the ultimate Feminine Divine. The one, who has the rose as her symbol; Mother Mary, Virgin Mother, Lady of the Rose. The roses greeting me here in such massive quantities felt like the core of my soul sending me a gentle smile, holding my hand, reminding me: You are on the Way. Still. Always. You walk with us, with you, with Creation. There is no separation. We are always One. And you are Loved, you are Love. 

That is when I realized I had heard the song of the hummingbird. I was staring a the huge rose bushes, and something moved. There it was, right in front of me, cocking it's head when I turned mine. We were looking at each other, and it was singing to me. The tiniest little thing, how can anything be this tiny and this beautiful? It had a grey chest, black body, and unlike my hummingbird on Whidbey, this one wasn't emerald, but a flaming ruby red. On it's chin, and on top of it's head. It lifted itself up in the air, hung there right in front of my face for a moment, then it was gone.
Magic, you guys. Sometimes it really is right in front of you.

Magic and miracles. They are everywhere. You just have to open your eyes. They are not something to be deserved. They are not something you had to work hard for and prove yourself worthy of. Miracles simply are. All you have to do is let them be for you, too. 

The little house was painted a faint yellow and greenish-grey on the trims. I don’t think you could have called it a castle without making the house itself snicker with delight at the preposterous grandiosity of it. But in that moment I couldn’t help but feel like the roses wrapping themselves around the structure made me the woman who slept for a hundred years. No princess, mind you, I take issue with anyone calling me princess. If I am to be referred to as royalty, you better go right ahead and call me the Queen. Not waiting for any Prince to come to my rescue, I rule the damn nation that is me. Anyway. I had been asleep. On all levels of life. Now finally, I was waking up. 

I had been travelling 6 months now. 6 months with no address. No place was waiting for my return. No family either. All I had could fit into one backpack so small, it didn’t even come close to violating the rules about carry-on luggage. One back-pack. That was my life. And it was perfect. When I got to exist like this, in the sun with my coffee and my words, it was perfect. I got up to move the heavy iron chair with the sun, a little to the left. The roses were yellow, they smelled like sweet tea.

6 months ago I had arrived at the other coast of this country. I had been scared and excited all at once, no idea what was in store. Or if I could do it. But ready. Ready to be afraid and doing it anyway. And now I had done it. I really had. 6 months, done. In less than a week I would be on a plane back to Europe, this journey over, a new one ready to begin. First back to Spain, then came India. 

I was returning to Santiago de Compostella to celebrate Christmas. My second pilgrimage was taking me home, in the sense of where my soul belonged, before a new one would begin. It made my heart so happy, my throat got itchy with tears held back. 

From the very beginning I had noticed how this journey had mirrored the first one. 6 months here, 6 weeks on my Camino. That’s where it all started. I had hiked 1.000 km, and it turned out I couldn’t stop walking. When I returned to my apartment in Copenhagen, I opened the door to a place that wasn’t mine. On paper it was. But really it was the place of a stranger, and that stranger wasn’t me. I sold it all; the apartment and most of everything in it. Gave the rest away, stored a few things. I didn’t leave a rich lady, but to my eternal surprise I also didn’t leave with a life long debilitating dept. All I knew was that I needed to go. And so I did. 

All along this new journey the symbols of the ancient way had met me in the new world. Santiago himself greeting me as the first thing in New York. Scallop shells on the beach on Whidbey Island. The entire cathedral in Seattle that I had wandered aimlessly into dedicated to the Saint with the same scallop shells adorning it’s every corner.

And then there has been the roses. The hearts. The Mother. The Light. God. One pilgrimage on the road walked for thousands of years by Seekers and Mystics from all over the globe. Another journey to take the Light of the Way out into that same globe to remind us all, that the true Way is always walked in the heart of the single person committing herself to hearing the call and rising up to meet it. 

*

It was incredible really. So many things I had never thought I would see. New York, the Met. So many things I never thought I would experience. Fly fishing, walking across the Golden Gate Bridge. The unbelievable beauty that is fireflies and hummingbirds.

I had been so trapped in the mindset of a good girl of the patriarchy. Deep within, I didn’t question the assumption that in order to travel, you should be part of a couple. Preferably with a man, but any couple would do. 

It was like no place existed to be experienced, if you had no one to share it with. The old adage that it didn’t really matter, if you were doing it alone. What complete bullshit. I knew that now. I knew that I got to do all the things I dreamt of, all the things that made me excited – just for me. I did not have to wait for anyone’s permission or anyone’s company. Not to go to the opera, not to eat at a restaurant, and not to travel. Not living. Not at all. 

All of which of course were so much stronger because I – and all like me - had the added spice of abuse to put on top. One of the most popular weapons of abuse is to make the world smaller. If they can succeed in making you think you have nowhere to run, you stay put. I was breaking that prison door wide open. I was making the world known. I was taking back the world. 

In a year I had now hiked across two mountain ranges on foot and then become a fulltime Pilgrim, walking where the heart lead me with no plans of ending that journey anytime soon.

I had also accomplished my goal of living out my bucket list. This had never been a vacation. This was not for fun and giggles. 

This is how I was going to survive. My glass had never had the existential trouble of wondering if it were half full or half empty. It had had it’s bottom blown clear off. Any damn thing you poured in it went straight though. It was my job to keep pouring. 

That was exactly what I was doing by giving myself the gift of seeing my dreams take on the body of reality in front of my very eyes. 

My bucket list had been so simple. All I had wanted, when I was forced to take a sober look at what would make me stay here, was to walk the streets of New York and witness art in the Met. And to hold all the babies. I didn’t hold all the babies. But when I arrived to my last destination, the first thing that happened was a wonderful new mother handing me her baby. And I had walked the streets of New York and spent endless hours at the Met when the journey began. I had now come full circle.

Really, this journey was one long Protest March for Female Empowerment. It was breaking the chains of abuse. It was a wild and ecstatic dance of survival. 

But most of all, in it all, running through it like an invisible river of silver and starlight it was a true pilgrimage; I was walking the world to walk deeper with God. To know him through knowing the fabrics of myself, and knowing beyond anything off this world all the places we did intersect. I was walking out to walk in. Becoming, only to dissolve into stronger and clearer Light. I hoped that some of that light might penetrate the body that carried me to reach someone who maybe needed to feel the Light a little stronger, too. 

Because as much as I was doing all of this for me, working hard on being done with anyone’s jealousy of that being selfish, I was doing this for every single soul who had ever yearned for the love that reaches beyond human bodies.

This was a Love Story. But never in the narrative of Disney. 

The love here was for ME. The subversiveness in loving your self as a woman.

SEEING yourself for the first time, apart from what others want and how others judge. ALLOWING yourself. Being afraid of what you might find once you begin looking. Looking straight at yourself anyway. And then beginning the journey of looking with kindness.

But ultimately this love was about the love that rests in the soul. The Love of God. I truly, deeply believe that when someone wrote in that big book that ‘best of all is love’ they never meant between man and woman (or any other human partnership). They really meant between you and God.

*

No question dusk was my hour. An involuntary smile spread across my face walking from Stephen’s house on the mesa down to Bolinas. As the sun descended and left the unending ocean on my right an increasingly deeper blue, all the hidden scents of the earth came out: The sweet and spicy smell of cedars with their bark peeling of in like the skin on the nose of a sun burnt teenager. The wild orchids sending calls of sweetness into the air. The wood stove burning somewhere adding a deep tone of bonfires and warm sweaters. The salt of the ocean. Every smell clearer as the air cooled and the day disappeared. 

I looked out across the Atlantic as the sun set to my far right. Out there somewhere they used to think the world ended and that I would fall of the edge if I went. Actually people still thought that, they had just completed their first Flat Earth Conference in Raleigh, North Carolina. Somewhere in my gut an itch told me I had to see for myself. I knew if I went far enough that way I would hit Hawai’i, and then Japan. 

Japan had a pilgrimage, it was called Shikoku Henro. But India was up first. India was on my bucket list of places. I’d never been, too afraid, not of the crowds, the noise, the safety issues. But of doing something I really wanted to do, that always being extremely vulnerable for anyone, but even more so for kids of abuse. It was an act of being in the world fully as who you are. In abuse that means placing yourself directly in harms way on purpose. But I was done hiding. Now the ticket was bought, the visa secured, the shots done and malaria medicine ready. Adventure, rough roads and probably explosive diarrhea was right around the corner. 

I had sold everything, I had nothing left, when this money was gone, there would be no more, but I wanted to keep going, I wasn’t done yet. Not with the world, not with life, not with any of it. I was ready for the next Pilgrimage to begin.