Remnants

It's been a good week, a good couple really, but this one in particular has held up some good news. I have a lot of freedom right now, made more sweet by an impending rootedness, as a few things I have been working on have come to fruition quickly and somewhat unexpectedly. I had an inkling September would be a month to 'stay put' and as things have unfolded it is good that I have. Life is about to change some, and there will be adjustments, but it feels good, like I am on the right path. I have trusted that the tides and winds know what they're doing and my timing has been good - I have felt steered towards my current trajectory, my hands only resting lightly on the wheel.

A bit more than four years ago, in the aftermath of my fathers' death, I drove myself home, from east to west across the wintertime highways. A few very notable things happened on that drive, one of which was a stop that I took at the woodland property my family had owned for over 30 years. During my fathers decline into dementia, we had sold it, over 200 pristine acres of hardwood forest, ponds, marshes and hundred year old farmstead long reclaimed by wild things. The cabin, originally a small one room log building had been expanded in our time there, but remained off the grid, heated by wood and powered by the sun. Snowshoes, feet and a beautiful cedar strip canoe were the vehicles of choice for us; my dad reviled recreational vehicles of any kind. My stop there, in the dead of winter 2013 was difficult; the property had been opened up, once shaded by hardwoods the winding and bumpy driveway had become a wide swath of flatness. New buildings had been put up, brutally carved out of the forest - places to store big machines used to further flatten and carve out pieces of the Earth. Skidoo tracks laced the clearings, the dead hides of animals were pinned to the walls inside. It felt a little like my own personal Narnia had been pillaged and turned into a logging camp.

There is also a story that I could tell about a wolf on the long road west, but I will save that for some other time. A very few know it already.

That year was a harsh one for me, a war zone of death and griefs, although also it also contained some of the truest beauty as well. The brightest and the darkest of times co-mingling. Since then I am  aware that this period of my life has been about recovering parts of myself - along a very crooked path, and not without casualties of it's own, but a recovery nonetheless. In these years I went back to a life where much of my work involved being in the field, time on oceans and rivers and mountains. That kind of life has a way of slowing you down, and I think it is in those places and times of stillness, of being 'unplugged' and caught up in the rhythms of self propelled travel that the soul gets a chance to catch up to our body. Planes and trains and automobiles simply move too fast for the spirit to keep up (so I've heard), and so we lose parts of ourselves along the way of this modern existence. For me it has been a time of making mistakes and being unsure but trying anyway, of not knowing whether I am on the right track or not. I have been a party to some messes. But the fog is slowly lifting and I am learning how to surrender a little bit more to the forces that move me forward. In all of it I keep finding pieces of myself along the way, sometimes small and barely noticeable, others profoundly solid and beautiful. I have taken them up, a feeling like I am re-becoming what is rightfully me. Finding a wholeness that only existed before I arrived to this lifetime.

Tomorrow I am making a return to a place where I believe I will find some more of these remnant shards. To spend 6 days solo along a stretch of coast I first travelled when I was 20. I have this thought that I might find something there, something of the simplicity and forgiveness that exists before mistakes are made. A return to something simpler. Where I might find that I am not broken after all, but have simply been wandering the wilds, untethered, for a time.