spirituality

When My Mind Is Free, You Know a Melody Can Move Me

~ Solo Chick Traveler ~ Leave a comment

I’m getting into the little Honda Civic my step-in mom is letting me borrow for the two weeks I’m back in the place I was born, formed, and launched from almost six years ago–Madison, Wisconsin.  No longer home, but forever the soil where the seeds of me sprouted.  My roots.  This Civic is half the size of the truck I use to drive my home around now—a 32-foot travel trailer.

As I lower myself into a seat barely above the ground, I roar off down the main drag of East Washington Avenue and all the familiar sites: the crack house looking Smart Studios where Nirvana recorded Nevermind, my old rival high school, the place where the 24/7 diner used to be where I had my first full-time job.  It’s all familiar and alI different.  I’m different.  Used to biking now more than driving now, using mile markers rather than exit numbered signs where I’m now living and moving around a two-mile by four-mile island.  I’m unsure of myself as I merge onto the interstate, which is weird on a road I’ve driven millions of times.  I turn on the radio for the soothing yet empowering combo music provides.  Drift Away is playing.  Of course it is.

Drift Away is mine and my dad’s song.  It’s taken his place in my life, announcing his presence as spirit. It’s not only apropos because he always drifted in and out of my life, our relationship written in morse code: dots of time together broken by dashes of distance.  But because we’d both fallen in love with the song through the Canadian acapella group that wowed him so much, he brought them to America. The Nylons.  My sister and I would watch their first show with the audience and the second show backstage, feeling the heat of the lights and the red velvet curtain brushing our arms.  My eyes flitted between peaking out at the audience who couldn’t see me to my crush, the soprano Mark. After the show, we’d hang with them in the green room.  It was as close to fame as I’d ever been and it made my already cool dad even cooler to me.

The summer before my senior year, after finally lobbying my mother hard enough, I got to go live with my dad.  My job as a bagger at the nearby grocery store, where I packed up many pig’s feet and snouts wrapped in cellophane on a styrofoam tray, planted the seeds of vegetarianism in me.  I’d just been talking about living in this neighborhood with Cara as we walked from the festival to her car.  And now here the song was coming on to match it.  And right when I needed it.  

Memories come flooding back of that summer.  Dad taught me to drive and I got my license.  Cruising windy roads to his good friend’s country bungalow where we’d listen to albums of great music all afternoon.  Dairy Queen drive-thru on Sundays—the one treat his diabetic diet could afford.  He took me to his fancy hairdresser where the locks of my permed big hair style iconic of the 80s fell to the floor, half my head cropped short in some avante garde asymmetrical fashion I was emulating from a Rolling Stone magazine on his coffee table.  

When Prince’s Raspberry Beret video premiered, I ran across the parking lot from work, pounded up the steps and barged through the door to hear him yell from the living room, “I’ve already got it on!!”  MTV would play it every hour on the hour for 24 hours and I’d sleep in fifty-five minute increments that night.  Setting my alarm for each showing.  In my bedroom at home, a life size cardboard cutout of Prince on his Purple Rain motorcycle sat in the corner and directly in my eyeline as I fell to sleep.  It had been a display in my dad’s friend’s record store and he’d gotten it for me once the promotion was over.

Shortly after I graduated college, he drifted out of my life for the last time.  Unmooring me.  All the religious pomp and circumstance I’d invested in over the years, all the times I’d prayed or clung to a Bible story for comfort—it offered me no comfort when it came to the topic of death.  Dad’s dying kicked me over to the spiritual realm where I sought and found the only acceptable answer: there is no death. Uncle Kracker’s remake of Drift Away was released about the same time to announce his presence still with me—I could say to the ether, “I need my dad right now” and this song would come on the car radio. Dad’s presence would then linger like he was riding shotgun. Training my mind to go beyond the physical evidence of what I saw and touched, I found everyone I loved still here. Their bodies left, but their love stayed. Keeping step with me moving through life.

George Michael’s Faith follows as if God Himself is the DJ, reminding me of what it took to sustain such seeking.  The same thing it takes now driving this car. The same thing a life of adventure requires.

My dad wasn’t always there when I needed him, but he’s sure got a way of showing up now when I need him most.  Pumping me up, giving me company and confidence.  And no doubt it was his adventurous genes at play when I decided to live the gypsy life on the road.  

Just In Time

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My financial funds hadn’t been this low since I was in college. I wasn’t exactly eating ramen noodle, but I was checking my banking apps daily–sometimes several times a day–keeping a close eye on what was coming in (not much) and what was going out (much too much). Do I drop my car insurance? The camper insurance? Food?

Florida can sustain me with sunshine, the salty air in my hair and surround me with the calm and curiosity that the aqua blue of the ocean evokes. But a pandemic that ended my job made me dependent upon an unemployment benefit of $197 per week (one of the lowest in the country) that I had to coax from an archaic website meant to discourage access. There was literally a stick figure that moved across the screen telling me where I was in line.

I’d lived like this for the past year and a half. I was now newly employed, but the paychecks hadn’t hit my account yet. Just as I was scanning my mind for even more creative financing options–I’d already returned all the Amazon purchases that still had the refundable window open and spent all my gift cards and return merchandise credits–my birthday weekend rolled around.

And as I was working in my new gig of Pool Game Instructor, the topic would come up. This led to one of the guests/gamblers at my floating BlackJack table insisting, in his accent from Quebec, that he was buying me a birthday drink. And then another. Sure, he was winning, but it was only Monopoly money–er, chips.

I was drying off next to a chaise lounge after saying I really had to go to another resort and play more games in another pool when he came up to me and handed me a hundred dollar tip. I tried not to take it even as my wallet’s mouth watered, knowing how much I needed it. He pushed it back towards me. I shook my head, took a step backwards, trying to give my resistance deeper meaning.

“Just take it.” He said it so softly it was almost like he knew how much I needed it.

So I took it. Because I did. Badly. And then I thanked God once again for filling a gap that I was powerless to fill. I was grateful, this week before Thanksgiving, and somewhat amused that this Power greater than myself had Its own creative financing at play. Moments like this humble me. Remind me. Of that Bible verse “Consider the lilies of the field….”

Pain Will Leave Once It Has Finished Teaching U

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Yesterday afternoon was one of those times when you’re shaken, literally, by how awful things are playing out. But by early evening it was clear–this curse had turned into a blessing.

I was working the late gate at the park under the scorching beam of the sun that likes to stream into the ranger station at what is already the hottest part of the day. After an aggressive visitor the day before yelling “Fuck you!” not just once to my face but again as he drove away, I was determined to be extra sweet today so as not to be in the least bit offending, thus avoiding any chance of any such repeat interaction.

That was my takeaway. Can you believe it? ‘Maybe if I asked more nicely how many people are in your car? then you wouldn’t get verbally abused’ was my deep introspective dive as I looked out over the beach last night, waves lapping at my feet, sinking my toes further into the sand. What crap. No wonder it didn’t take away the gnawing in my gut. No wonder it invited another lesson. “Pain will leave once it has finished teaching you,” Bruce Lee said.

Cue the physically threatening cycler. For the second day I am shaking at the gate. This can’t be right. So I ask for help. And when the ranger doesn’t help, and I’m still shaken fifteen minutes later, I call for more help. And I learn that not only is my concern valid and my command for this person to leave the park the correct action but it was retroactively so, going back to the day before. I learned there were consequences to someone treating me that way and the calvary was coming.

Another ranger was making rounds to try to locate the offender. Management called the police. A ranger stayed with me until they arrived. And even though the person was never found (maybe he’d realized his possible fate and had left already) I was touched by the “I have your back” response. As people filtered out of the park at closing time and I pulled down the flags, I caught site of a pair of headlights that were not moving like the others. It was that officer; ready for action, positioned for support. The whole thing was starting to melt me like candle wax.

It had me open, humbled, willing enough to see what the real morale of the story was while I pedaled my bike hard out of the park, music on full blast to crowd out of my mind the replay of the awful scenes I’d endured.

My default is the lone ranger. I’ll handle it. I can do it. I got this. And I’m quite proud of my independence, it has served me well. It’s taken me around the world and through some tough times. But it has also, I can see now from this new place in my curriculum, kept others from lending a hand. Standing with me. Somewhere, I got the idea that the highest level of achievement was doing it all by myself.

“Somewhere!?!” my inner wise voice snorts in a tone so sarcastic I had to laugh out loud. We both know exactly where I got it. I got it from the mother who relished watching me move out at seventeen and a father who left me at four.

Now that I think about it, I have advanced far beyond the age where one finds worth in announcing, “Look! I did it all by myself!” No longer a child tying her shoes for the first time or mastering riding a bike without training wheels. I was an adult. I’d made it already. And besides, my worth was established long ago–by God. I come from Perfect Love, created in His Likeness. There is nothing I need prove.

I wondered as I watched the wagons circle around me, felt their focus on the hurt that had been done to me and their own efforts to try to make it alright again. Had they always, in some version or another, been with me all along waiting for my cue? Was help always just a call away?

Clarity in Key West

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So, I’ve been biking by this new housing development that the city is doing, making it affordable by basing the rent on the person’s income. As I’ve blogged before, I bike by their spreading of gravel, propping up of transplanted trees and pouring of sidewalk cement. I’ve been loosely entertaining the possibility, but landed on a ‘pass’ for the sole reason of it being permanent.

But then something happened. I had an epiphany. My previous preclusions parted and through their veil I saw something. My first camper I had for four years. It was an “I think I’ll travel the country for a year in a camper and blog about it” experiment that led to more years and less states and less blogging than I had anticipated. It seems the ‘there’s the trip you plan and there’s the trip you take’ streak continues.

So, now I’ve bought a bigger and better camper with the same kind of idea. I’m reenlisting for another four years–like a presidential term (and that’s a happy coincidence) and I’m almost one year into it. If I look down the road a little, say three years, what do I want that to look like? I ask myself.

Well, I’m not taking this thirty-footer out west or into the hills of the Blue Ridge Parkway. I’d already decided that my next set up would have me driving my home–a nice Class C with opposing slides to really widen it out–and towing a small, economical car. Firstly, it’s way easier to hook up a car than a camper and secondly, whenever I want to go exploring, I’m driving a big truck with a big engine that gets only slightly less awful gas mileage when I’m not towing. Give me a little Fiat!

This train of thought collided with another train of thought: that I’m going to be 53 soon and I’m starting to skirt around the edges of retirement–from the land of semi-retirement where I currently reside–and at 55 getting disability gets easier, which brings in the idea of getting coverage because of my Crohn’s disease. Then I hear another whistle blow: the substitute teacher train comes chugging along, out of the garage where I’ve been storing the thought for years.

These tracks start to weave a pattern as I simply watch and listen to the whistles blow. I could put my name on the list, it would probably be a few years before I came up anyway, and what if about the time it did, I was ready to sell this camper. And what if I became a substitute teacher–getting my working with kids fix and summers and holiday vacations off to jump in a camper van and go travel then. And then, when I do fully retire and pull my Social Security benefit and tap into my 401K and investments my rent is protected.

What if standing still still gave me the moving about the country option? What if permanent meant I’d have plenty of time that was flexible and temporary? Could this be both things for me?

I started to get pretty excited. Not just on the option of it all coming together to give me everything I desire, but in the way it is crystalizing. I trust that. I trust it because it’s the same way this entire lifestyle of mine first crystalized and every move I’ve made since. I trust what I let happen versus what I try to make happen.

PS in this week’s Throwback Thursday blog I write about how the idea of this lifestyle came to me and crystalized.

But First, Miracles

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I’m toning up my spiritual core. Much like, and for the same reason as, my body’s core. My physical life parallels my mental/emotional/psychological and spiritual life. They reflect one another, represent each other, and ultimately integrate into one.

I’ve gotten flabby. I’ve gotten lazy. I make progress and I take my foot of the gas a little. It’s human nature. A Doctor’s Opinion written in the early days of A.A. said that an alcoholic in recovery who relapses is no different than a heart attack patient being devout about changes to diet and exercise, only to waffle (pun intended) once their health and welfare no longer hangs delicately in the balance.

I was doin’ alright, I thought. I was getting by. But I was crossing the lines I had drawn for myself and it was putting me in some inner conflict. Once that scope showed my disease advancing, that was a wake-up call. And then my copy of A Course In Miracles, which I opened one morning on a whim, got wet. As the saying goes, “The heavens opened” and rained down upon it before I could rescue it. I put it in front of the fan to try and dry it out. The fan blowing on it opened it to random pages and I would catch glimpses of inspiration as I looked over at it and read it to myself. It gave me peace after reading a line or two. . . just like it always did. I would put it out in the sun to dry more, it would get rained on again, and the process would start all over.

This went on for days.

I can take a hint.

Much like someone walking by the windows of a gym and glancing in at the well-defined muscles of those pushing themselves through perspiration towards their goal, I started flexing my mind’s muscles and tightening up my spiritual core. For the same reasons why you’d work a body’s core: stability, strength, alignment.

So I have an anchor when the winds blow and the storms roll in–guaranteed just like the seasons. I will have sunny days and rainy ones. Calm times and turbulence. My core is my anchor keeping me steady and grounding me in my true self. Elizabeth Gilbert says in The Big Magic, “You can’t just go from bright moment to bright moment [as a writer], it’s how you hold yourself together during the creative process that matters.”

Crohn’s disease is where my body attacks itself over a perceived threat that isn’t there. My mind does the same. The call is coming from inside the house. And the solution is in there, too.

I can get distracted and pulled by events in the world and then blown off course as I busily try to handle the challenges all by myself. I’m spinning plates and juggling balls until I freak out–overwhelmed by ineffectiveness, exhausted from trying to control the uncontrollable. I surrender. I step back. I zoom out, as the observer, and regain perspective.

A spiritual guide once told me, “My problems come from looking through a microscope. My solution comes from using a telescope instead.” I have tested this repeatedly and it never fails.

“Of myself, I can do nothing,” Jesus said. “I do all things through Him Who created me.” Translates for me, trying to twist and turn things to satisfy my fragile ego leaves me frustrated and empty; using the power of creation, the Universe, the divine whole, plugs me into a power strip of energy that is out of this world. Beyond my measly 3% of brain capacity I’m employing to handle crisis after crisis.

I got a Christmas card years ago that I ended up framing–it spoke right to my heart. I’ve hung it for so many holiday seasons, I know it by heart.

Sometimes we see only the underside of the tapestry of life All knots and gnarls and missteps. But there is a Master Weaver who sees it from above. And He weaves according to a plan.

Every year I pull it out from the light blue Rubbermaid tub with the slightly darker blue lid marked “Christmas.” And every year I search my soul whilst scanning the past year, then whisper, that’s true.

That is the best definition of my God, my Higher Power, that I could give. I put faith in the plan, and I trust the Master Weaver. And I find peace whenever I remember that.

To be an empty vessel and let Love pour into me and overflow onto the world–that’s purpose. Why settle for a job, when you know you have a function. Who would fly with the wings of a sparrow, once you’ve felt lifted by the mighty wings of the eagle.

“You do not ask for too much,” A Course in Miracles asserts, “but far too little.” This book saved my life once. I could feel it doing it again. Not from death, but from apathy. From a lack of passion and connection.

‘The answer is always more spiritual growth,’ I heard on a tape or CD sometime from someone. A long time ago. I keep testing it, and it keeps proving itself to be true.

Any good guru will tell you , “Don’t believe what I say, try it. Apply it in your own mind and see what happens.”

Be like children, curious, inquistitive, trusting.

I know not everyone believes this. I am learning that most people don’t. I’m still shocked by that. It makes perfect sense to me.