Monday, June 15, 2015

You Are Here

If we are lucky, our lives are spiral, not linear.  We return to special places and revisit special friends time after time.  Sometimes it's intentional and sometimes it's a random twist of fate.

This past year I went back to San Angelo, Texas, where I spent my formative years.  It was a special trip to visit my best friend's family.   This spring, I hiked in a wilderness area in Arizona where I studied nesting bald eagles when I was in my early 20's.  A few weeks ago we visited the east coast as a family and I revisited places where I lived and worked when I was 19 (in Connecticut and New York).

Without realizing it, I think that I've been led to these places to close certain chapters in my life -- in order to start a new one.  In the course of these wanderings, I feel like I've expanded from the inside.  My spirals are outward and upward, reaching toward something new and different.  The spiraling feels wild and unmoored.  It's in the revisiting that I am learning what my new direction will be.  I think that you have to know where you've come from to know where you need to go next.

Central Park, NYC

You are here: Our GPS did not work on the east coast and so we spent a lot of time looking at maps, and especially maps on kiosks with a big dot and arrow that said "You are here."  I took this to heart and made it my motto.  I tend to get anxious when I'm in big cities, and especially on the crowded east coast.  Whenever I got homesick,  I would say to myself, "you are here" and could feel myself step back into the moment with my family and enjoy..."