I dress in yoga pants, a cotton tee, wool socks, and leather boots. I fill a bottle with water. I rub sunscreen on my skin. I grab a hat.
I ask if it was a good time to go away. If it's a good time to be alone. It is.
Scott and I have been together since he was eighteen and I was nineteen. When we started spending time together, something told him we would not be fleeting. Something told him we would be a lifetime love. I felt it simply as a yearning to be near him.
Twenty-one years later, this is still true.
We have a lifetime love. I still like to be near him.
This yearning to be near him has, from time to time, kept me from listening to my longing. I don't want to wander from my inner longings any longer. I can care for others. I can be in this abundant relationship. And I can be authentic and attuned to myself.
I leave the busy rental house and go alone into the quiet wild.
We are in northern California, visiting family and Lake Tahoe, pine trees, stars, and heat.
On the dry dirt, I walk. I want to reach the spine of the pine ridge mountain, which stands behind the house where we eat, gather, and sleep for a week. I want to reach the crest and sit in the shade of trees. I want to sit within their stillness.
Walking alone is precious.
I notice where I am. Notice my breath. Here the air is thin. I breathe slowly.
Notice my body. I tend to myself (and only myself) in every moment. Do I need a rest? - a sip of water? - to stand on this boulder?
The path is bordered by shrubbery and burned wood - the remains of past wildfires. Where once there was fire, now there is life. A diversity of plants, lizards, wildflowers, insects, and birds surround me, while palls of dirt poof around my boots.
As I walk along alone, I look around this rugged resilient wild. It reminds me of when I showed my mother a tree near our home in Massachusetts. I didn't recognize it. I wondered if she would. It is a tree with soft green leaves shaped like goose feet. The tree is young, tall, and bright in summer light. I was surprised I didn't recognize a tree so close to our home.
And, as if it were nothing, Mom says, "Well, that is how forests are made."
Oh! Yes! Of course!
The birds and animals, they carry seeds inside their bodies. These forest farmers eat and plant their favorite foods by digesting them and then planting the seeds embedded in the soil of their excrement. The earth then takes it back and digests it in its own way, swallowing it, offering it water, and a place to sleep. The sun then sparks the seed to life. To life!
And here, across the country, in California, I see it. The birds and mammals are making homes in the rich wildfire soil. They are eating and planting life.
It is as if the ridge is my finish line. Like the years I have spent seeking my spiritual salvation. It was a quest with an end. I pass no others on foot, but so many soar by on bicycles, hollering happy, breathless hellos. I once hurried. I still do sometimes.
Give me the answer! Get me there faster! Tell me how to be. I want to be free!
And now I see that it isn't found in the hurrying. but in the quiet, steady pace of living authentically. It is found in the harmony within oneself. It is found in the LOVE within oneself.
I decide then that there is no end, but an intention. I hope to sit on the small mountain.
It takes me one hour. As I reach the flat peak, the universe offers me a gift. A sign to remember me and the stirring within my spirit. It is a sign to remember that we four (Scott and our two children) are together and yet separate. We each must go out and walk our individual journeys. The gift is a stone throne.
You are queen. It said. You are the queen of your life. Be in your power. Embrace your essence, and listen close to it calling you home.
I am here to remember my life, the eating and the planting of it. I am here to remember me. To look within and then go. The world will offer me what my soul needs. The world will offer me my stone thrones.
