News from Jules | 01.09.2023 | On the Road: Part 4
Even though I was traveling in my white Volkswagen Rabbit, not on a donkey, I kept thinking about the story of Mary and Joseph’s wintertime travel back to their homeland.
At each stop, I too found cozy shelter and generous hospitality from friends old and very, very new while enduring my own health challenges. The stars burned bright and colorful lights twinkled even brighter in the dark night sky of each town I explored—Denver, Colo., Taos, N.M., Flagstaff, Ariz., Salt Lake City, Utah, Baker City, Ore., White Salmon, Wash. The colder it got, the better I understood how the Holidays became such an important part of winter—the anticipation, hope, joy, and abundance warming up our lives.
I’d only been gone for eight months, but this was my first time coming “Home for the Holidays” in 20 years. Thus, extra anticipation: How was it going to feel?
I was eager to see close friends and family, but I was anxious about being back in the city.
I stayed one step ahead of every storm while traveling across the country with the help of my amateur-meteorologist-and-personal-news-crew Dad. Another storm was rolling in with sub-zero temperatures just as I was crossing Oregon in the home stretch.
I told myself I was craving hot soaking pools, though I knew I was procrastinating on returning to Portland when I took a chance and stopped in Bingen, Wash., to stay at my favorite hotel and spa in the Columbia River Gorge. I was only an hour away from Portland but could get stuck for days if I wasn’t careful.
Sure enough, early the next morning my phone vibrated with a text from my Dad that car accidents had shut down both highways in Washington and Oregon. Uh oh.
When the highways opened later that day, I knew it was time to finally return.
I arrived in Portland, Ore. on Dec. 20, 2022—just in time before the next winter storm froze the city a couple of days after my annual exam appointment, lunch for my Dad’s 75th Birthday and the Winter Solstice on Dec. 21.
My hunch was right.
The culture shock was immediate. I spent most of last year near small towns surrounded by farmland, forests, or mountains—or all three!
I forgot about blaring sirens, bumper-to-bumper traffic, houses squished together, store-after-store-after-store packed with stuff, abandoned-falling-apart-burnt-out buildings, miles of asphalt roads and concrete sidewalks, and trash everywhere.
The Holidays themselves—Solstice, Christmas, New Year’s—with close friends and family were low-ley and lovely but otherwise, I just felt sadness and grief.
Things were no longer the same. Portland was no longer my home.
As Maia Toll describes in her introduction to “Wild Wisdom Companion”: “The challenge of suspending my disbelief…was a fabulous distraction from the sadness of leaving a home and a time in my life that I had loved.”
Returning to my storage unit to unload the bins from my time at Omega and my road trips was when it really hit me.
Knowing how many bins, bags and bikes were smooshed into the entrance of that 5’x15’ unit, I wasn’t sure if everything was going to come tumbling out on top of me. As I slowly turned the numbers, popped the lock, and opened the door, thankfully nothing moved. But, I still had to step back, overwhelmed by my own life.
The life that came before.
And the life that might have been.
There was a chill in the air. Like being visited by ghosts indeed.
Having just watched A Christmas Carol, I felt the full weight of the chains I forged in life so far. Just like the Ghost, “I made it link by link, and yard by yard; I girded it on of my own free-will, and of my own free-will I wore it.”
The box of cards for The One. The binder of wedding ideas. The bins of hand-me-down baby carriers and nursing supplies. The boxes of fine china. The bins of cocktail dresses and high heels, fancy sneakers, and jeans from size 4 to size 12. The books I’ve already read. The wine glass collection I’ve rarely used. The memorabilia I’ve never looked at again.
And that was just the first couple of stacks that I could see.
No wonder I procrastinated on coming back to Portland. Back to the reality of dreams that no longer fit, expectations that never did, and consumption that isn’t sustainable. A lifestyle that was so overwhelmed in the present it clung to the past and grasped for the future.
Sure, a lifestyle that I’ve been conscientiously coming to terms with for years.
But, still easier to tuck away in storage than to painstakingly dismantle the remains.
While I start training to climb Mt. Hood, discerning small towns to explore, and doing odd jobs to make some money, I’ll be cleaning out my storage unit.
Sorting through it link by link, and yard by yard.
For now, I’m keeping my present simple.
May you heed your free will this week.
Love,
Jules