Today was one of those days that happen when you’re traveling when everything feels like magic, and the right things just unfold before you. My life is feeling a bit like that, right now. But these moments, as present as I am when they are happening, seem to overshadow all the other shit that’s happened right before and after. I don’t know if that’s why it feels so special, but it makes me think.
The second I made the decision to leave Colorado and Strava, life fell into place. The year before I left to Colorado, I was so excited to find a new home and make my mark and redefine everything; and so many moments felt utterly perfect and guided.
I’m not a religious person, but I am spiritual. I know that word gets thrown around nowadays, like it has a connotation of being solely for yuppie white girls who read tarot from time to time and sometimes wear a few crystals. Guilty, except for the crystal part cause though rocks are cool I just haven’t found a stone that’s changing my being from the inside out yet. If it happens, I’m open. (Edit: I’m in Joshua Tree and total bought some crystals here. It was bound to happen).
Carrying on. Spirituality has been a strange thing for me my entire life. Growing up in an aggressively atheist household, being associated with “God” in any way was looked upon as if you’d decided to have a lombotomy. In fact, it is v. possible that my father referred to religious people as “mentally sick retards”, because that was language he often used. As a kid, I generally agreed with this, having never been to church or experienced anything remotely religious outside of Girl Scouts, where I remember whispering the “to serve God” as part of the girl scout promise during camp and feeling my breath quicken and my heart tingle, secretly loving the thought of belonging to something, especially an all powerful magical being that was watching your every move and controlled the sweet party happening in the afterlife. I remember wishing God were real, because that would mean that all the people that told me my mom was in a “better place” and “watching over me” would have been right. So, it makes sense that as a 5th grader going on 6th grader, my teepee, teepee #3 of the Toyaibe horseback riding unit of Camp Deer Lake, hung up a green glow stick in the middle of our teepee, called it The Orb, gave it magical powers, chose Native American names for each other and started doing rituals. Trust me, I could write novels on the things that happened at Girl Scout Camp, outside of it being my favorite part of the summer and the only way for me to get away from the household I grew up in (nature as a refuge has been pretty carved into my psyche), and a place amongst women where I didn’t have to mother my brother or weirdly wife/friend/mother my own father. Or that time that I couldn’t hold my pee at night so I peed into my special pillow and then tried to hide it in my laundry IN MY TENT ALL WEEK. Young Tangelo, what were you thinking? But that’s for another story. This is about spirituality.
So, we worshiped. We sang songs. And mostly, we felt connected. Connected to each other, to the land we worshipped on, all due to power of having a (now half dying) glowstick hanging from the center of a very appropriating structure next to a lake. Of course, it was more than that. We were all newly turned 11 year olds who loved riding horses, many of whom wanted to try this whole sleep away from home thing, some of whom were going through puberty. There is power in that.
For me, spiritualit
y is a sense of connection with self, people, place (physical/mental/emotional) and an accepting welcoming of the unknown (sometimes called the great expanse/darkness and light, all living beings and objects/unidentified space matter/et cetera.)
It can be one, two, three of these or all four, and when it’s all four, magic happens. There’s that loving hand of the unknown just pushing you in a way that you can do nothing but accept and be in awe of. You’re a vessel, heart and mind in complete abandon, and things happen through you, instead of to you or by you. It’s unexplainable, but everyone who has been there knows its power. Explaining more makes this sound even crazier, so in the words of the glorious Keak da Sneak, “Yadidimean?”
Well, back to me. This is my reflection, isn’t it? Ahem.
So, Colorado. How do I explain it? Hannah had some real talk with me after I had a second panic attack on a trip back to San Francisco with Strava, and I got back on the plane ready to call it quits.
Learning #1 - I am ridiculously stubborn, oftentimes to my own detriment, and I am relentless in creating my own suffering. (Internal voices - shut up, you’re such a wuss, it’s not that bad, you’ll like it if you try hard enough, you didn’t give it a chance, you’re just a cry baby, you’re too sensitive, stop crying, it’s not that bad)
Did I feel like the earth had been shaken beneath me and I couldn’t find solid ground the month that I started moving out of the Bernal apartment? Yes.
Did I then continue to move out and go to Spain and have a traumatic experience at CTI leadership where I felt like a depressed and petulant child because my heart felt broken and shattered and I couldn’t understand it and I felt completely ungrounded, in addition to all and the leadership concepts at CTI, especially in all the group activities and Ropes Activities and council facilitation were directly in conflict with my core values and beliefs and it felt very emotionally manipulative but I was already so trigged and in the “freeze” of flight or fight that I couldn’t do anything to help myself or the participants except try as hell to meditate over and over and over again because I could hardly move or breathe or speak without breaking into a puddle of anger and fear and disgust and depression. Yes.
Did it continue after I picked a house in Boulder and moved my stuff across the country to the Rocky Mountains (yet another shout out to Hannah, who helped me move, and Adrianne, who helped me integrate.) Yes.
Did it continue through the summer, the winter, the spring when I kept my Strava job but struggled so hard to get out of bed on workdays and would take 1hr long walks to cry and sit my the river and write letters to my inner child telling her she was safe? YUP.
It continued even when I spent hours upon hours at the pottery studio learning how to throw clay. I would get up, make coffee, feed kitties, go to the studio, throw for 4-6-8 hours, get soup at the grocery store, cry in my car, make dinner and then think about how much I just wanted to sleep again so I didn’t have to face existing. (Don’t worry, I would never be suicidal. Too much guilt about being a burden on people in my death. It’s actually greater than how much of a burden I feel I am on people in my life, so just IMAGINE that. Not gonna happen).
Until it stopped happening. I was on a trip home, and after every trip back to SF I’d go to the ocean and be able to breathe again. People would ask, If you hate it so much, why don’t you just move back? But I was stubborn. It’s not that bad, I told them. It’s me, not the place. I mean, I can hardly breathe and I am depressed all the time, but really, I’m being too sensitive. I have to give it a year, I said. After a year, I’ll know. People say it takes two years to settle into a new place, so I gave myself one year to know if I wanted to stay a second.
Marie-Eve was the first person who looked at me when I said that and she said “why a year?” That seems stupid. Of course I made up lots of excuses, and being the friend she is, she shrugged and basically said, ok - doesn’t make sense to me but sure.
I couldn’t explain it. Everyone asked, what’s wrong? And I couldn’t tell them. It was beyond words. Sure, I could rationalize it into my abandonment issues and my childhood and my friends being my chosen family, and I’m still not doing the work I was meant to do, but even with all those things, there was something else. It moved through me. Learning #2. It was a complete absence of spirituality.
Lack of connection with self - I couldn’t find myself. I didn’t know where I was. I knew who I was, and what I stood for, theoretically, but I completely lost the deep connection within myself. It was gone. Lack of connection with other people. There were some connections, but they were still old connections from home in Colorado that they didn’t feel like they came from the new place, and while there have been men, none of them have been the deeper partnership I’ve been looking for. Lack of connection with place - I like the mountains. Don’t get me wrong. A long backpacking trip, some lakes, incredible mountain biking those are fine. But they don’t have the same feeling for me as the ocean does. I dreamt of the dolphin club. The waves, the quiet, the expanse, the cold and wet and salty. The literal lack of air in the mountains affected me more than I could have imagined. In fact, mostly I thought I was imagining it. But I’m extremely sensitive to it and that was hard to admit. Accepting welcoming of the unknown. Oh, there was unknown, but I would NOT call it acceptance. More of a “Oh fuck no unknown, there is too much of you right now and I feel unsafe and completely disoriented so I do not want you in my life k thanks” kind of feeling.
Until I physically and mentally and emotionally could not take it. I made it 11 months. I couldn’t take it only because I could see my pain reflected in the empathy that my loved ones showed to me (you know who you are, you rockstars, thank you) and I knew I was hurting them by hurting myself (Lesson 3, I have this issue of not being able to recognize my own suffering until others are suffering when I’m suffering. YAY, something to work on in therapy/coaching). So I had to make a change, and throw caution to the wind (accepting the unknown), rely on my friends (Adrianne, carol, oil, bella, Hannah, Danielle, Meve, so many more..) and deepen connections, reconnect with place (desert, Jtree, then the ocean and dolphin club), do some coaching and facilitation as my own business (thanks Kim) and BOOM. Connection to self restored.
So, this trip has really been what I needed in order to process and reflect on all of it. To see where I have wisdom and where I can still grow, and to reconnect me with spirituality. It has been doing that hardcore.
