Out of the shallow end
Flourish Vol. 51
Long time, no newsletter, huh? I’d like to think I’ve had a few pretty good excuses for being MIA, including becoming an aunt to the most perfect little girl, and embarking on a long-awaited road trip spanning six states, five national parks, 3,000 miles and two weeks of much, much needed vacation.
The points I wanted to hit along the way — Tucson, Marfa, White Sands National Park — had been clear for months, as was the final destination: Austin, Texas. Somewhere different, somewhere new. But just how, exactly, I was going to get there — driving, flying, camping, renting a trailer? — kept changing and evolving up until the very weekend before I was set to hit the road. And I suppose that’s a sort of metaphor for how I do most things in my life lately.
Gone are the spreadsheets, the schedules, the five-year plans. Here, instead, is spontaneity, split-second decisions, adapting, pivoting, going with the flow. There were days on the road when I didn’t know where I’d be sleeping that night. There were strangers, strange landscapes, new and occasionally frightening circumstances I’d never been faced with before. There were bug bites and sunburns, little cell service, a Texas sublease booked the day I left Oregon. There was a whole lot of hope and a few dreams, and the faint outline of a future that shifted from day to day beneath my feet.
Unlike the many days during the pandemic I spent consumed by anxiety and fear, locked in my bedroom letting the outside world grow scarier the longer I was away from it, I have never felt calmer, or happier, or more at peace than when I finally hit the road. Car stuffed to the brim with coolers, coolant, clothes; unsure whether I’d be gone a month or a year. A loose itinerary, a rough sketch, a tenuous hope that where I was going would be somewhere better, or at least different, than here.
That’s not to say I hadn’t lain awake thinking about this trip more nights than not in recent months, or that I didn’t pour hundreds of dollars into gear I’d need to be best-prepared for driving thousands of miles solo, in the height of summer through some of the harshest climates this country has to offer. But ultimately, prepared is really the best we can be; if the past year has taught me anything, it’s that plans mean virtually nothing, and the future isn’t guaranteed. The most we can hope for is clear skies, and the best we can do is learn to swim when the rain inevitably begins to fall, washing all of our best laid plans away.
There is nothing worse than letting fear keep you at the shallow end of life, and I’m finally ready to swim again.
And now for some free-writing from the road…
3,000 miles solo, becoming reacquainted with my own company, my heart skips and my skin prickles at the realization that I am hundreds of miles from anyone I know. Smelling of sage and citronella. Talking with your hands, all animated movements and you come alive again. Blood pumping in desert air, iridescent sunsets and it’s different now. Everything is. But the best is not behind you yet. Lightning will strike twice, and you’re crackling with electricity. Go out and live the life you wallpapered inside your head, be the person you’d become if all the rules fell away. Because the truth is none of it’s real, and all of it’s fleeting, and you will attract everything you put forth into this world, and so you must be brave enough to risk something, to wager something, to try something new. Nothing comes from staying rooted in fear. Believe in magic, in a life that is everything you ever imagined and everything you couldn’t. Believe that the people who stayed did so for a reason, and the one’s who didn’t had a reason too. That there is a plan for all of this, even if you can’t see it yet. You cannot leave every door open all at once. You cannot keep one foot in the past and wonder why you are stumbling over the present, why you can’t quite reach the future. Breathe in every single moment, deeply, selfishly, ravenously. Worry is a waste. It is not selfish to relish being alive, to be grateful for your breath and body and air and earth beneath your feet, for this exact second in time. This singular guarantee, this existence without limits, because it’s the only real thing there ever was or ever will be. The past is memory and the future is hope. But now. Now is where all the magic happens.
And now you are further east than west
Impossibly small beneath the skies of far west Texas
July heat enveloping your skin
And lightning like flashbulbs
Veining the horizon
The night is thick with piñon and sage
It sounds like crackling and hissing and thundering and rain and then
Nothing
Just silence
Infinity beneath these cosmos
Like the sun might never rise again
But it always does out here
A state where you know no one
And have never felt less alone
Or more at home in your own body
Glistening with humidity
Feet dusted with the Rio Grande
Bitten and bruised and yet
You’re not tired or blistered or burnt
You feel like you could walk every mile of this desert
That feels like deja vu
Like coming home to somewhere new
Here is a person you could be
And here is a life you could live
Beneath the snaking tail of Scorpio and
Stardust smattering the Milky Way
You fell to earth
To be here for this moment
Don’t you ever forget that
When you say you don’t believe in fate
A whole lot is changing in my life right now, but I’m hoping to get back to writing more regularly, in my more regular newsletter format, very soon.
In the meantime, breathe in, breathe out, look up. Keep believing in the magic.
-Olivia