Twirling Leaf

Ahhh, the 1980s. No one had central air conditioning, no one wore helmets, and—for the vast majority of the decade—there weren’t any Selective Serotonin Reuptake Inhibitors (SSRIs). I wrote a while back about the earliest memories in my life. If you read that, you may remember that my mom suffered from a severe post partum depression from when I was 8 months old until I was 3. This was in the early 1980s before prozac or any type of SSRIs were available. So my mom hung in there as best as she could, albeit chemically depleted, hanging on by sheer will and powered by the force of a mother’s love.

I used to define this early 1980s era in my life by the trauma that I felt from feeling emotionally separate from my mom who was the only other person around most days. As I got older, I could easily trace some of my most intense complexes back to this time period. The word “complex” gets thrown around a lot these days, but in Jungian terms a complex is like a tangled knot of unconcious memories or pain that, when activated, goes off like a land mine. There was a time in my late teens when I’d lose my absolute shit (aka in psychological terms, “this complex was triggered”) if Collin didn’t sound happy when he answered my phone call or if he walked into the room and didn’t make eye contact and smile. I have done a LOT of inner work along the way, and also Collin got a bachelor’s degree in psychology (with a specialization in emotional knowledge) while (or maybe because) we were dating. 

BUT. As I’ve gotten older, and have become a parent myself, I’ve learned that we ALL get scarred to some degree. None of us get out of this life unscathed. We are all both the perpetrators and the victims of pain. The goal isn’t to avoid pain; the journey is about growing through what life throws at you—the good AND the bad. It’s really difficult to compost the trauma, but sometimes the forces at work in this life seem bent toward compelling us to do so. Both psychological and physical trauma have a way of emerging from the depths of our consciousness or bodies; in psychological terms, Jung calls this compensation. Compensation is when a motif comes into your dreams, your thoughts, or even your life. It’s when a dynamic or an issue bubbles up from your unconcious, presenting your conscious mind with the opportunity to integrate it. One of the basic drives of Life is towards health, whatever that means for a particular being.

And while it isn’t particularly fun to have your trauma emerging or complexes getting triggered, ultimately, it is helpful to understand our wounds to heal, to grow, to evolve, and to realize our identity. It takes courage to face the pain, but the pain guides us to the source of the wound; if we understand the root cause of the pain, we are more likely to understand how to formulate a sustainable support—possibly even a cure—rather than just reacting to the pain. 

The wound I incurred when I was little was that I felt deficient in terms of human connection; I’ve had to gain courage to work through this wound, and in some unconscious form of compensation, I was motivated to move to a mountain in Vermont. Deep in my unconscious, I knew I was going to have to confront this specific pain of feeling emotionally isolated. And yet, some strange force within me compelled me to go towards that path fully knowing it would bring up my trauma. Sometimes the only way to heal is to draw out the cause of the pain.

This happens with our physical bodies too.

I got a pretty bad splinter last week when I was loading up our fireplace with logs. I couldn’t even see that I had gotten a splinter, but I felt a surge of pain as I groggily tossed a log into the fireplace at 5:00 am. I inspected my finger, but there wasn’t anything visibly detectable. Over the course of the morning, my finger became swollen and red. By the end of the day, it hurt so badly that I couldn’t use it. Yet, I couldn’t see that there was anything in my finger causing this. If it hadn’t been for my symptoms, I wouldn’t have known there was a splinter in my finger. But the throbbing, swolen, red nature of my finger alerted me that there must be something deep under the surface. So, I applied some of my bite and sting poultice that I had made a few months ago. I left it on for a few hours, and when I washed it off, there was the faintest hint of a foreign object deep under the skin. I applied some more and repeated the process. After doing this three times, enough of the splinter emerged that I asked Collin to tweeze it out. After he nabbed it, there pinched between the tweezers was a 1/4 inch piece of wood. No wonder I was in pain! And yet, without the purging effects of the poultice, I never would have been able to see, let alone remove, the cause of the pain. 

My time living in Vermont was many things—beautiful, epic, cozy, extraordinary in every way—and the degree of solitude I experienced there served as a poultice for my trauma. During Covid, we spent 405 days without leaving the state of Vermont and barely leaving our land. By day 390ish, my pysche felt like a disorderly Mr. Potato head that a rascally kid assembled. An ear where my nose should be. A pair of lips on the side of my head. Or in more artistic terms, my inner world felt like a Picasso painting. The cumulative effects hit me hard all at once; I was eating a breakfast sandwich I had made—a darn, good one too—and suddenly I felt a physiological surge of panic and terror. It felt old, ancient. Like a Balrog. That was the offical beginning of my active journey working through those early years of trauma. 

Over the course of the following year, I took baby steps to recovering and healing. I focused on nutritive support (I later found out that I had been deficient in B12, and likely also Vitamin D). I stopped homeschooling, and enrolled my kids in the community school. This gave me time to hike 5 miles every morning with Collin while we talked and connected, run on my own a few times a week, write, and process the pain. I took baby steps rehabilitating my mental health; it was slow going at first because any small thing that triggered the feelings of unchosen isolation (feeling lost on a trail, driving somewhere unfamiliar without cell service) could lead to a full blown trauma response. I’m talking full-on, body shaking uncontrollably, can’t breathe, can’t think, trauma response. 

The journey back to Topanga and living here has been its own chapter in my healing. I’ve slowly by slowly worked up the courage to run on the trails by myself. By last spring, my anxiety was still bad, but I was dedicated to not letting it keep me from living a full life. We wanted to celebrate our 20th anniversary by taking a once-in-a-lifetime style trip to Switzerland this past summer. I wanted SO much to go, but I knew it was going to require me to confront some of my triggers. Tunnels, elevators, flying on two different planes for a total of 16 hours there and 16 more back. But this trip was my DREAM. We were retracing Tolkien’s steps of his journey that he took when he was 19—the journey that inspired him to create the world of Lord of the Rings. We had a book that told us all the hikes to take that he had traversed and which destinations correlated with beloved places in Middle Earth. This was going to require going WAY out of cell service to trek through Rivendell (the Lauterbrunnen Valley). This was going to require driving in tunnels (there are SO many tunnels in Switzerland!!) as we crossed through the Alps as well as driving the harrowing albeit gorgeous Grimsel Pass. And then, there was Mordor (aka Zermatt). Getting on the sky train to Zermatt was a whole ordeal. My first attempt boarding the train was unsuccesssful. They closed the doors and announced there was a problem with the train. Full blown trauma response. Incidentally this happened while some friendly folks from San Diego were trying to chat with us. I was like, “sorry but I can’t be normal right now” and started shaking and hyperventilating. We got off that train before it left the station.

Second attempt: I stayed on a little longer, but was still like: NOPE. 

Then the train operator—noticing that we kept hopping on and then off again with all our luggage—came up and talked to me very kindly. He was confused but curious as to why I kept exiting the train before it left the station. I explained, like a little kid, that I was scared. Rather than ridicule me or shame me, he was so patient. He explained how the train worked, how they’d solve any problem that could potentially arise, told me EXACTLY how many minutes the train ride would be (gotta love the Swiss precision) and told me it was fine to wait until I was ready. Collin, too, was so incredibly patient and kind. I mean, he could’ve gotten annoyed or been embarrassed. But he just sat on the bench there with me, letting me wait until I was ready. I eventually got on the train, put on my headphones and my music, and set my timer for 12 minutes. Like Max from Stranger Things, as long as I just let the music fill my thoughts, I was okay. And then we got off the train. That was a breakthrough moment for me. It was kind of like immersion therapy. Just what every partner wants their signicant other to say about their anniversary trip, haha. It was an extraordinary, romantic, and dreamy trip in every way. AND I was able to work through a lot of trauma. I specifically wanted to hike up the Matterhorn (Tolkien’s Mount Doom) because I wanted to symbolically leave my trauma there. I channelled my inner Frodo, climbed to about 10,000 ft elevation, and cast the source of my pain in the fires of Mordor. Okay, there were no fires. But I climbed really high, and I really did feel a shift after that day.

As I have worked through the trauma, and now that I’ve been on the other side of the worst of it, I have been able to discover the gift of that era that I used to define as primarily traumatic. 

With the source of the pain withdrawn like that splinter, I now see that the gift of that time was that Nature nurtured me. This earth is my Mother, too, after all. My earliest memories are of my days spent outside, naked as the day I was born, deeply entrenched in the natural world. That little backyard and all that was in it (the plants, the trees, the water, the light, the dirt, the rocks, the sticks, the berries, etc) became my non-human kin. Deep in my cells, I experienced a oneness with the natural world. These relationships sustained me and gave me a sense of belonging with and to them.

I named all my plant friends because no one was around to tell me any of their other names. There was “Ink Berry” who was such good friend to me, and I’d use her ink as paint for my body, my drawings, and any potions I was making. It wasn’t until just this past year during my apprenticeship at Earth Island Medicinal Herb Garden that I learned Ink Berry is known as Poke (Phytolacca americana), and she is one of the more formidable and powerful herbs in the garden. Milkweed (Asclepias syriaca) was my Wishing Plant, and her seeds were “wishes.” I believed that if you set an intention or made a wish on the seed, that wish would come true if the seed floated away (rather than fell to the ground).  Stories like this go on and on about my casual, feral relationship with my non-human friends. This Venn diagram of overlapping space between my imaginal universe and the natural world is where I spent enough time that it comprises my memories from those first three years. Now that I have worked through so much of the trauma, I am able to remember the beauty, my mom’s sweet face watching me as I made my potions and mud pies, the feel of the sun on my skin, the morning dew on my bare toes.

This is my origin story—being nurtured by the natural world and my imagination.

It’s funny how now, looking back, I can see the thread guiding my life. I’m reading a book for my Herbal Energetics course, and the author of that book, Kat Maier, introduced me to William Stafford’s poem, The Way It is. This poem beautifully describes an unchanging thread of our heart’s journey that we follow. Life evolves and circumstances change, but somehow, if we hold onto it, we never get lost. I’ve always known that I’ve been guided by the Polaris of Love, but now I am beginning to see that there’s also been a thread that’s been there all along. In the tradition of Western Herbalism it is called the Vital Force. This Vital Force has many names across cultures and traditions. Ancient Greeks called this force vitality. It’s called Gi in Korean frameworks, Ki in Japanese concepts, Qi in Traditional Chinese Medicine, Prana in India’s Ayurveda tradition, and the Iroquois nation calls it Orenda. It’s known as Ruach in Hebrew/Biblical understanding, and among the Yoruba people of West Africa, it is called Aṣẹ. Just to name a few. 

All these names refer to the essence of vitality itself; it’s numinous, and it’s difficult to wrap a word around it. And yet, as it was with my plant friends and I, regardless of what you call it, it is what it is. Or as Shakespeare more elegantly put it via Juliet, “a rose by any other name would smell as sweet.” 

Whether or not you want to believe in this concept spiritually, it’s observationally true in a practical sense that all living systems have an inherent drive towards life, growth, complexity, and health. 

Right now, collectively, there’s a lot of trauma coming up for our nation. It’s being triggered and playing out in ways that are offering us the opportunity to confront the source of the pain. The things that happened in the past have been there all along, causing pain and ill health, but they were undetectable for some of us who had the privileged ability to ignore or not notice it. This nation was built on the genocide of and broken treaties with the Indigenous nations that were here before European contact. When we throw our arms up incredulously in disbelief that this current administration is not honoring due process for immigrants—maybe we aren’t aware that this echoes the legally sanctioned U.S. Fugitive Slave Acts of 1793 and 1850, which employed people to track down, apprehend, and return self-emancipated people to slavery. When we are indignant that Trump is not honoring the laws, not honoring the word of the constitution—we are forgetting, perhaps, that this is the exact behavior that founded America and “claimed” the land and the resources therein for itself. The 1868 Treaty of Fort Laramie declared that the Black Hills of Dakota were to be repatriated to the Sioux. When gold was discovered there in 1874, the US broke this treaty, allowed miners to extract gold on Sioux land, and redrew the boundaries. That’s one of many examples of broken treaties. These are not new problems. The systemic causes of ill social health such as racism, white supremacy, patriarchy, and unchecked capitalism have been active forces at play here since European contact. Our nation had some great intentions, but there was also a lot of systemic injustice baked into it. These injustices have been here under the surface causing ill health all along. Now, as if a poultice has been applied with the appointment of this administration, the source of the pain is emerging. Will we have the courage to face the collective trauma? Will we be able to integrate these truths into our consciousness and confront the dominant narratives that have gotten us here?

We’d all like to project and “other” people who are overtly causing harm, making these individuals villains. And yes, I do hope that this administration and all the perpetrators of harm are held accountable. But the truth is, when we totally outsource the blame, we avoid taking responsibility. We ignore the shadow within ourselves. We ignore the work we need to do to dismantle these systems of injustice within us. And just like that kind train operator, trauma diffuses with empathy. The way through this mess is to activate empathy for one another—yes, even the people who scorn and ridicule empathy. Empathy requires that we notice something in ourselves that connects with what we see in another person’s struggle. That’s why some of us don’t enjoy practicing empathy. It requires us to self reflect on really difficult things. Then, hopefully, we can find the gift in this wound. When we integrate and face the pain and the trauma of the origins of our nation, we will be able to also find what has been good. And there’s a LOT of good. I love this land, the ideals of this nation, and what we could be if we choose to follow the pain to the source of the wounds. The vital force is urging us towards growth and towards healing. Those of us who have descended from white colonizers are not to blame for the wrongs of our ancestors, but we do have the responsibility to do what we can to bring healing. 

So yes, of course it is healthy to get angry in the face of injustice. Yes, hold this administration accountable. But also, let’s do our own work so that we come out of this era a more healed nation—not just a nation that swings back and forth between ultra conservative and ultra liberal. Let’s integrate the good and the bad and own our national origin story. Like I said, none of us get out of here unscathed or without pain. Let’s do the work collectively. Because in the words of the legendary James Baldwin,

“Not everything that is faced can be changed, but nothing can be changed until it is faced.”

At some point between childhood and now, I woke up one morning (and this was honestly only a few years ago, if I’m being honest) and had the realization, “Oh, wow. I guess I’m not going to be a child star that gets discovered at the mall.”

See, my childhood was split between the 80’s and 90’s, so I was 10 in 1991 when Kris Kros was discovered at the Greenbriar mall in Atlanta, Georgia by record producer and rapper, Jermaine Dupris. Legend had it that Dupris spotted Chris Kelly and Chris Smith (aka the Mac Daddy and the Daddy Mac, respectively) while they were just out and about because they had a unique look—most notably, they wore their clothes backwards. Dupris just knew from seeing them that they would be stars under his tutelage. A year later their hit song “Jump” topped the Billboard for 8 weeks straight. 

From that point on, every shopping trip became a potential moment of discovery for my future stardom. The fact that I lived in the corn fields of Delaware and said shopping trips were usually to the nearby Acme—hundreds of miles from any known record producer— did not dampen my spirits. I would sing and dance down the aisles whilst collecting groceries from various parts of the grocery store, hopeful that just around the end cap (hosting the potato chip display) there was a talent scout just waiting to sweep me up and help me realize my potential. Fortunately, I also grew up in the era where kidnapper vans and after school specials about creepers loomed large in every kid’s psyche. So I was simultaneously unrealistically hopeful yet ready to turn my jazz hands into a left hook and right uppercut combo if necessary. 

So, that morning not too long ago when I woke up and had the “RIP child-star dream” moment, I also started realizing an imaginary graveyard of other dreams gone by. I sat there in bed thinking, “ I guess I’m also never going to get my Ph.D by 35 and be a tenured professor by 40. Guess I’m not going to be a parachute journalist covering high-stress stories in high conflict zones. Guess I’m not going to be a young, twenty-something travel-show host on the travel channel immersed in the beautiful chaos of a busy market in some very different culture from mine, eating interesting food with never before tasted spices while dressed in local attire as the sounds of music in a different scale mixes with the crowing of roosters. That last one is very specific because it left a very real and lasting impression on the 16 year old version of me when I saw an episode of a Lonely Planet travel show where that exact scene unfolded. I remember it because I happened upon that show during the era when I was homeschooled and alone with my cat most days eating a steady diet of generic “frosty flakes” throughout each day mostly due to boredom. It was at that moment that I realized some people live extraordinary lives, and I wanted to be one of those people. 

Now, some people in this world are more pragmatic people than I; they’re more tethered to reality. These people probably don’t wake up when they’re 40 and suddenly realize this graveyard of career dreams gone by because they made practical career decisions all along. They have aspirations and inspirations, sure, but they also set SMART goals. Specific, Measurable, Attainable and I’m too lazy to look up the R and the T. I’m thinking of my former co-worker and friend who obtained her BA in English and became an editor right out of undergrad. She is still, to this day, an editor—some twenty years after getting her degree. I’m thinking also of my sister in law who obtained her BS in nursing, became a nurse, stayed home with her very young children, then when they went back to school became a nurse practioner. And true to the name of the profession, she IS a practioner meaning she practices her expertise and medical skills. These two are prime examples of people who studied something they intended to use as a career to make money. That is THREE levels deep of planning and pragmatism that I utterly lacked at every step of my life’s journey. 

I have always had this belief that if I follow my intuition and keep my inner compass pointed toward Love, it will all work out. I’ve started to realize how much I staked on this belief. Identifying my soul mate at 17 (he made my heart throb and yet I felt more myself with him than anyone else). Choosing my major in undergrad (I wanted to experiences other cultures). Getting married at 21 (Spend my lifetime with my soul mate? Sign me up ASAP!). Career choices (a salaried job that gives me 5 weeks of paid vacation for backpacking every summer? Yes, please!). Growing two, whole humans in my body (reading too much about it made me queasy, so I just trusted my body had it covered). Raising them (Again, nary a book in sight. Isn’t this just relationship? Comes naturally to me!). Educating them (isn’t human curiosity innate? If I just include them in everything I’m doing all day and/or give them materials that support that curiosity, isn’t that enough?). Decisions to turn down doctoral offers (really digging my kids more than I thought I would…maybe I’ll do that later), turning down job offers (my kids are really digging me—don’t want to waste that precious window of opportunity!), and deciding to remain the primary care giver while homeschooling for the years that most people build a career (see past few parenthetical comments). Moving across the country again, and again, and again (each time it seemed like the right thing to do). 

That desire to live an extraordinary life has been fulfilled with every era as we have definitely charted our own course through many unconventional and plot-twisty life chapters. I never found that extraordinary outlet in a career like my 10 or 16 year old self thought I would. But, I also never planned to camp with lions right outside our backpacking tent, but we did. I never planned to get not lost (we weren’t on a trail but Collin assured me he knew generally where we were) in Patagonia, but we did. We saw a rainbow sunrise and watched and heard avalanches falling from nearby mountainsides on Collin’s 25th birthday. I never planned to ice climb to the top of Sahale mountain in the North Cascades or encounter a Grizzly Bear eating an elk in Banff while being three days’ of hiking from any town. Who would have thought once we had Sen and Junes we’d live in Arkansas on a lake for while they were little? Who would have thought it would be such a beautiful and wonderful place to be for exactly that era? Who would have thought we’d move to Topanga three, separate times—each time lured by both the beauty of natural landscape and the ease with which we fit socially here. Unbrushed hair for your two year old? Normal. Androgynous-looking little half-dressed humans? Normal. A blend of love and light and leave me the eff alone when I’m hiking in the mountains? Normal. Who would have thought we’d leave Topanga to live on a 64 acre parcel of pristine forest with a pond and homestead smack in the middle? Who would have thought the kids would meet their lifelong childhood friend there in those woods? Who knew that a little over a year after we moved there, the three of them would run freely and happily together day in and out during a global pandemic while the outside world devolved into chaos? Who would have thought that our little family would travel to Thailand—three times for Col and me, two of which were with Sen and Junes—each time for 5 weeks minimum. Who would have thought we’d go on safari in Uganda with the aforementioned pragmatic (yet still bad ass and adventurous too) nurse practioner sister in law and fam because they were living in Uganda at the time? We never planned our impulsive, used-RV purchase and subletting of our rental house two, different summers in a row, but those were full of one core memory after another. Through Banff, Glacier, the Grand Tetons, Yellowstone, Petrified Forest, Saguaro, the Grasslands, the Badlands, and then up to Vermont (where we found our land) and on to Acadia. And all the places in between. All these adventures and more were largely unforeseen until we got right up to the moment where we decided, “This is the right path. Let’s take it.”

I’ve lived my life like I’m rafting a meandering, glacial river with sporadic class 5 rapids from time to time. And while it’s been absolutely the level of extraordinary that I desired, this “listen to your intuition and keep the compass on Love” approach sets one up to wonder where the heck one is from time to time. And where one is headed. And just how one got there. And sometimes the river adventure might take you to an abrupt and unforeseen shallow, rocky stretch. And perhaps it’s in these figurative moments—when you are trying to carry your raft across the jagged rocks to find deeper water—that you wonder why you chose this as your destination. And perhaps you’re barefoot so these rocks really hurt, and your raft is also heavy and cumbersome because rafts are meant to be flotation devices not things you carry whilst walking on slippery, jagged rocks. And it is at this moment that it is helpful to remember that this wasn’t your destination. You didn’t choose to organize your life around ending up in the jagged rocks. You chose to go on the adventure. And sometimes the adventure has rough patches. But in moments like this, it’s important for me to remember that my intuition and compass set to Love has never ultimately steered me wrong. I just need to hold on and carry that raft just a little further because I don’t know what’s just around the next bend in the river. 

Sometimes just around that bend—there’s a beautiful stretch of deep, fast moving water where you can rest upon your raft as the journey continues in the way that you hoped it would. The trick is to not give up. To not despair. To not look at your bloody feet when you’re on the rocks and think “things must be ALL wrong. These bloody feet are a sign that things have gone terribly off course!” Also, it’s helpful to avoid thoughts like “it’s all my fault. I’ve made bad choices and they led me here.” 

You haven’t. And this difficult set of circumstances isn’t a sign that things have gone terribly wrong. Bloody feet on jagged rocks are part of the journey. It’s all part of the adventure. It’s not the selling point for any adventure; that’s for sure. But it’s kind of in the fine print for living life wholeheartedly. Even the pragmatic people have those moments. Because anytime we are taking a step out in courage to live boldly, to live authentically, to truly LIVE—we take the risk that we will fail. But failure means that you are living courageously. Failure means that you are stepping out of your comfort zone and into the area where growth happens. If you’re not failing or at least struggling often in life, then you’re probably not growing.

And why do I have this confidence? From whence does this optimism flow? 

Here are some things I’ve learned to be true:

1) Life is full of struggle. This isn’t an opinion; it’s fact. To grow, one must struggle. It’s part of being alive whether you are a plant, an animal, or a fungi. To be alive means to struggle. Congratulations, bloody foot friend! That is confirmation that you are a living, breathing participant of this universe!

2) Life is resilient. It is one of the qualities of vitality. To continue to be alive, life must be resilient. How does life become resilient? Resilience is gained through struggle. 

Lather, rinse, repeat. 

You struggle, you’re resilient. You struggle, you’re resilient. 

The point of life isn’t to eliminate struggle. The only way to do that is to die. And then, you disintegrate and decompose and go back into matter to become part of some other life form’s building blocks. And they struggle and become resilient and so on and so forth. And of the spirit/soul/psyche, who knows? I’ve got my theories, hopes, and dreams, but there’s only one way to really find out. And I’m really not ready for that particular adventure yet.

So, I’m not a child star. I’m not a parachute journalist. I’m not famous. But the journey I’ve had has been extraordinary. And right now, I’ve got to say—things feel a bit bloody footed on the jagged rocks. We’ve got some unknowns right now. We’ve got some challenges we’re facing. “We” meaning our little fam and also “We” meaning the United States. It’s not our destination. This is not where the story ends. This is not where our river adventure becomes a leaking cess pool quagmire and we decide to just set up camp there. Nope. I refuse. Until there is no more breath in my body, I will struggle. Another word would be resist—especially when what you’re struggling against is an oppressive force trying to stop vitality. Because that is the essence of Life. That’s my intuition. That’s where my compass is pointing, and it’s still set on Love.

Things are pretty terrible right now in the United States. I’m not going to try to sugar coat that. This is not the destination. This is part of the journey. And here’s the thing: unfortunately, this is what a lot of people have experienced for quite a long time. People of color. People who aren’t able to blend or mask to stay safe. People who dared to come out of the closet in less progressive eras. This fight is not a new one; it’s just heating up to the point that a lot of us who haven’t had to face it can’t ignore it anymore. And that, is ultimately, an important part of the adventure. We all have bloody feet now. So, let’s all pick up our share of this heavy-ass raft and keep going.

Do not despair, my friends. This is not the end. This is not the destination. Let’s give this raft the old heave-ho and keep going. Because that’s what Life does. That’s what Love does. And the two of those are one in the same for my whole, beating heart. 

Ahhh, rain in the canyon. It’s one of the most peaceful experiences I can imagine—especially since I made my peace with mudslides. I’ve come to learn that mudslides are my friend. Mudslides close the boulevard for months at a time, and they allow the canyon to become an isolated little village, cut off from the rest of the world. Hence, all the through-traffic ceases and the sounds of revving, racing Lamborghini’s and crotch rockets are replaced by the sounds of crickets and frogs. I’ll take it. Of course, it’s not great for the small businesses here if that lasts too long, so I always hope they clear it before too many months pass. 

I love living somewhere where nature can still flex in a way that affects a population of 20 million people. That’s pretty magnificent. And I don’t just mean a rainy day. Although, sidenote: Collin is becoming more Californian than I expected. He thanked me for running errands in the “crazy weather” today. And I was like…”ummm, it’s just raining.” But I think we all know that here a little rain can also become an atmospheric river. And that a dry, windy day can become a raging fire. So, I get it.  

Nature has tried to tell us in no uncertain terms that she (I’m not sure nature has a gender, but I guess because she’s often referred to as “Mother Nature” we’ll go with ‘she’”) is at her breaking point in terms of population capacity here. Our water is sourced largely from Northern California, so it’s not sustainable to live here in that regard. Our food comes from not too far away (much of it is grown in the central valley not too far away), but compared to local farms in Vermont, it’s not nearly as hyper local of a food culture.

Some of these environmental concerns were what caused me to want to move back to Vermont. But, try as I did, Mother Nature herself seemed to want me to stay. She sent two mudslides and a raging, massive wildfire both years that I tried to sell my house. Whether you want to spiritualize that or just see it for what it is: nature is the reason I couldn’t move. But a whole lot of other people did move out of Topanga. Which makes me think that she’s shaking out the people who aren’t willing to live in awe of her intense, numinous qualities. 

I find this comforting. And so, as I’ve been moving through my grief about leaving our beloved land in Vermont, I’ve been able to lean into this sense that I belong here. Per nature’s will. For now, at least. We found out (through the super sleuthing of one of my dear friends I made while living in Vermont) that the people who bought our former homestead/land never plan on selling it. Or at least, they do not plan to sell in any foreseeable timeline. That was a real heartbreaker to find out. I am a delusional optimist (I’ve covered that in other posts), so I was oddly convinced for a while that they’d move in a few years and that we’d buy it back. Apparently, my imaginal plan for them is not manifesting. 

So, I’ve had to embrace that. We’ve all felt that boundary that life serves us sometimes, right? We get handed that rigid set of parameters for “what is” regardless of what we want. Good god, it’s so frustrating when you’re someone with an internal locus of control like I am. I feel like Life had to put me in a padded, locked room to handle the disappointment. I’ve been raging against the reality that we sold our land for a few years now. I’m getting tired of punching the padded walls. I think I’m ready accept it now. 

Acceptance is a weird thing. Acceptance is that calm resolve that’s past where feelings dwell. Usually, I have had to feel all the feelings first, though. I cry, I rage, and I exhaust myself out of feelings. By the time, I reach acceptance, it’s not so much a feeling as it is stance. It’s a posture of the heart and the mind. 

Now that I’ve accepted that I’m not moving back to our land, I am more open to seeing and feeling my actual life as it’s happening. I’m thinking about planting our native plants before the rain instead of looking on Zillow for new homes. I’ve deleted Zillow from my phone, actually. Big step for me. Instead of shopping for different lives in different places, I’m helping Juniper pursue her areas of interest this year: acting, singing, surfing, guitar (well, that one is on Collin, but I do nag them to practice) and language learning (that creepy, passive-aggressive Duolingo Owl does all the nagging for that). And instead of trying to convince Senya that they will be fine changing lives mid-highschool, I’m witnessing their flourishing as their roots go deeper and deeper into their school community and friend groups. Without the fear of imminent change, they’ve been able to really connect and thrive here.

With both of my kids also becoming more independent, that’s left me a lot of time to explore my own path. At times, I’ve had to be put back in the padded room (metaphorically, guys. Nothing alarming is happening here). Raging, non-acceptance for my kids’ growing up, existential crises that the best is over and it’s all downhill from here, etc etc. After a while, I tired myself out again, and I’ve accepted the fact that my kids are indeed growing up, and it is what it is. Such a trite statement that people use: “it is what it is.” But that little hackneyed expression is quite profound. It’s a declaration of acceptance. It’s the acquiescence of the soul and mind to reality. It’s letting go of illusion and being present with what is. It is what it is. 

As I’ve embraced reality and been present with what is, I’ve also had my eyes opened and my heart more available to experience all that I love that is special here.

I love that the woods here are comprised of old growth trees; these oaks have been alive for hundreds of years. And they have rights. No one is allowed to cut them down—even when they’re young. I love living somewhere where trees are our elders and they have rights. I love that there are so many native plants and chaparral that grows all throughout the mountains. I love that so much of the land is undeveloped and will remain so.

Topanga is like an oasis in the urban jungle. But the land is wild. No one can or will tame her. And I love that. I respect this land. I bow to it. It is not mine, and there’s a history of colonization that is hard to hold. This land belonged to the Tongva and the Chumash for thousands of years. By rights, I shouldn’t be here. But like so many of my fellow Americans, this continent is the only home I’ve ever known. I came into this story at a point so far down the line, that the best I can do is acknowledge the past by learning about it from an Indigenous perspective and live with reverence and respect going forward. So, I walk with humility, with gratitude, and with a resolve to care for and cherish this land. With reciprocity, as Robin Wall Kimmerer explains in her books. With love.

No more alternate life shopping for me. Instead, I’ve been composting again. I’ve been diving deeper into my herbalism. My new, Vermont-based program (it’s a hybrid program with weekly classes that are live-online and week-long intensives in Vermont once a year) starts officially in February, but I’ve been doing the self-guided pre-requisite coursework. There are two classes I’m completing on my own before February: Relational Culture and Justice in Herbalism. They’re both super academic and sociological. The Vermonters are definitely bringing the serious side of herbalism, and I love it. My Californian program is much more relational and spiritual. I love the balance of both, actually. One inspires me to dismantle the patriarchy and deconstruct my white privilege and the other has me exploring herbal aphrodisiacs and making Jungian-inspired dream cordials. They’re both great. 

I’ve also had to confront the underlying causes that make me want to move. I’m still untangling them, and I’m sure I’ll write a coherent post about it someday. But for now, rather than architecting a new life, I’m recognizing the impulse to move when it arises, and I’m getting curious about why that’s my go-to. 

Anyway, that’s my latest update, and these are my current reflections. I took the rainy day today to eat gluten (gasp! That’s almost illegal here), run some errands (despite the sky falling), and rest and recover. I have a touch of bursitis which I keep thinking is actually called burstitis (which sounds like the diagnosis for an injured Care Bear. So I might keep calling it that). But it’s far less exciting than my made up name for it. It’s like a bit of inflammation from overuse in my hip. I love running, and historically I’ve had a hard time resting. But…it is what it is. And sometimes being present with what is looks like eating a homemade bagel and drinking a cup of hot chocolate while I read my herbalism journal articles on my sofa by the crackling fire. Right here. In this little cabiny house by the newly flooded creek. In this quirky town I love. That’s nestled in these wild mountains I revere. 

In other words, at home. 

During my time living in Vermont, I was always looking for ways to meaningfully contribute. I would look around at my neighbors who were teachers, farmers, welders, homesteaders, and —ers of all kinds. I didn’t really have (m)any practical skills of which to speak. This phenomena was a real challenge to my sense of belonging and purpose there. I would often say to Collin that I felt like I was a unicorn on a farm. In this metaphor, all the other animals on a farm are there for at least one functional and pragmatic reason, yet I lacked one. I’d imagine the farmer coming into the barn looking through the stalls. He’d tend to the pigs, chickens, cows, draft horses, and then he’d see me and be like…what’s this colorful frivolity? “What do you do?” He’d wonder. I’d probably prattle on about dreams and magic and happiness. He’d move along while wondering aloud if unicorn burgers are a thing.

I desperately wanted to find my —er so I could contribute. And if I couldn’t become an —er, then at least I’d be the best, most contributing unicorn I could be.

So, imagine my interest and delight when in January of 2021 I stumbled upon a piece of news in the Vermont Digger that announced that select boards (town governments) would be voting on whether to legalize the sale of marijuana for recreational use in their town in the upcoming weeks—but—this vote would only happen in towns where the residents had put it on the agenda. Usually, getting an item on the agenda required a minimum of 50 signatures, but due to covid restrictions, they were waiving this prerequisite. So, all it took was a written request and someone willing to make a case for the agenda item to the select board at their monthly meeting. Finally, I could do something useful for my community!

Like many of my great ideas, I thought, this is a perfect thing for Collin to do. So, I wrote to the select board and requested that the item be added so that Collin could present on the many benefits of marijuana and the benefits of voting to legalize selling it for recreational use. Collin was like, “wait, what?” But like many of my great ideas, I was like, “what could possibly go wrong?”

“All my neighbors will be so happy!” I thought. It was already legal to use it for recreational use, but it wasn’t yet legal to sell it for recreational use. So, think of all the economic opportunities that the farmers will have with the legalization of growing and selling marijuana for recreational use. I saw all silver linings.

But then, it occurred to us: maybe we should actually have tried weed at least once before we present a case for this. You know, just to be authentic about it. So, we purchased some from a local grower, and we made a very responsible plan to have only one of us try it at a time on different days.

I went first one night after the kids went to bed. I went outside under the clear, winter sky which was brilliantly studded with stars. There under the glory of the Milky Way, I smoked a little joint of Indica, the variety of marijuana that is calming. It made me very relaxed and extremely spacey. I’m very used to having mental acuity and always being at the helm of my own thoughts. It was a bizarre experience for me to have my mind so relaxed that thoughts were happening more passively and without urgency. I took a hot bubble bath and my mind told me a whole story about two immortal souls who were in love in an eternal dimension. They lived freely and happily as two ethereal spirits in what was essentially paradise. The physical world—earth as we know it—was beginning to lose hope that love was real, so these beings were sent to earth to see if they could find each other throughout many different lifetimes and many different reincarnations and still love each other in the imperfect world. In one reincarnation they were just the hardware on the bathtub. That was when I realized I was high and probably needed to just go to sleep.

The next day, I woke up feeling entirely normal and refreshed after a deep, restorative sleep. This was the day that Collin was going to try smoking weed. “I’ve got lots of projects I want to get done around the property, so I’m going to try the Sativa variety.” This is the variety that is more energizing rather than calming. So, I got the kids settled into the rec room of our guest house, and Collin decided to smoke a little bit before beginning his projects for the day. I came back over to the main house, and from upstairs I heard a loud thud. “Col, are you okay?” I called up the stairs. “THIS IS NOT FUNNY!!” he yelled. I later learned he was trying to say, “This is not FUN” but couldn’t quite get the right words out. I came running up the stairs and opened the doors. He yelled the same statement again, and I was in total agreement that this situation was not funny (or fun). He flipped over the solid, oak coffee table like it was a cardboard box. Apparently, as it turns out, Collin turns into the Incredible Hulk when he smokes weed. That’s what we found out that day. Long story shortened into a slightly abridged version: turns out he had a bit of an allergic reaction/psychotic break when he ingested the THC. As we later learned, there is a rare gene in males of Austrian descent that creates this effect.

The rest of the story goes: he eventually passed out and was in a catatonic state for 6 hours, during which time I was scared for him. So I called 911 to ask for an ambulance. Because I mentioned that he flipped over the coffee table, they sent a police officer ahead of the ambulance. The ambulance got stuck in the snow on our mile-long, dirt, mountain road leading to the house. The police car, unfortunately, made it. I told him it wasn’t really necessary for him to be there, and he told me he had to make sure the situation was safe before allowing the ambulance medics to come inside. That was when I noticed the gun in his holster, and my stomach dropped. I was afraid that Collin was going to get agitated again and realized that this could end very badly with a gun in the mix. “Listen, I don’t really think you need that; and also he’s a really kind and gentle person who is just having a bad reaction to weed.” He told me, “well, if he starts swinging at me, I’m not going to just stand there.” Suddenly my bright idea did not seem so lined with silver. My unicorn mission was failing. I can’t even be a functional unicorn. Fortunately I kept this thought to myself, as I’m pretty sure this police officer already thought we were nuts.

I ran up ahead of the cop (after asking him if I could go tell Collin that the cop was there before he just went into the room where he was) to try to communicate with my catatonic pal and let him know the lay of the land.

“Soooo, bad news” I whispered. “They sent a cop, and he’s not very nice.” Immediately after hours of being nonresponsive, Collin blinked, turned his head and said, “Oh, nooooo.”

“Listen, just be cool; don’t freak out.”

I went back downstairs to tell the cop that he could come upstairs, and we headed up the stair to where Collin was. I took a deep breath and opened the door; to my great relief there was quite a transformation from mere minutes before. I mean, like Grandpa Joe from the original Willy Wonka movie upon Charlie finding the golden ticket level transformation. He was standing up and alert and probably seemed normal(ish) to someone who didn’t know him. I could tell he was high as a kite, but he held it together. He wasn’t psychotic any more, so that was definitely a tally in the points column for team Hulk and Unicorn.

Then the medics finally arrived, so I went downstairs to let them inside. They were so kind and very sympathetic. They showed me pictures of their dogs on their phones shortly after arriving and meeting my dog. And then they broke the hard news, “We will have to admit him to the pysch ward based on what you’re saying happened unless he can sign a waiver indicating that he denied care.”

Oh, brother. How did my plan go so awry? I just wanted to do a good thing for the community and now Collin is going to the pysch ward? Could Grandpa Joe handle reading a legal waiver and signing it? We would see. Again, I ran upstairs and tried to explain the situation to him ahead of time, and he was extremely motivated to not get admitted to the psych ward. So he did his best to walk down the stairs and greet the medics. Then he sat down on the sofa and tried his best to focus his eyes and look normal. The medics handed him the waiver, and he looked at me and asked for one last confirmation, “should I sign this?” I encouraged him to do so, and within 5 minutes from that point the cop drove back down the mountain with the ambulance full of medics following.

Well, that was a real doozy of an experience, but we are not quitters. I mean, Collin definitely quit ever trying weed again. But we weren’t going to quit on our first political foray. So, a couple days later, Collin still attended the select board zoom meeting (with mild and well-concealed PTSD from the experience). He presented his powerpoint on the many merits of legalizing the recreational sale of marijuana. And it passed! I don’t know if this ended up making a positive difference for anyone, but I hope so. I do know that the following summer the smell of weed growing in all the fields was so strong that I would get a little spacey just driving from our house to town, so someone gave it a shot I guess.

4 years later, I live 3,000 miles away from our old mountain homestead in a different climate, culture, and phase of life. And here I am again faced with a variation of the unicorn feeling—more now than ever since I stopped homeschooling. The —ers here are a bit different—many are writers, actors, creators, performers…and teachers still (everyone everywhere needs teachers). I find myself again feeling superfluous and without a functional contribution or purpose. I still try to use my magic to make the best unicorn experiences—hosting potlucks, bringing people together for crazy ideas like designing bike-powered parade floats, volunteering at the kids’ school as the friendly room rep, writing this blog, even. But at the end of the day, I know I need more. I tried to be a farmer, remember? That was supposed to be my new path once the kids were in school.

When my farmer dreams were dashed, I decided I still wanted to do something with plants. So, when our plans to return to Vermont failed, I enrolled in an herbalism program. It’s been an amazing beginning, but it is more of an experiential introduction to herbalism. I’m ready to really dive into a more rigorous program—one that prepares me academically so I gain a mastery of knowledge but also one that will allow me to graduate with a skill set. So, in August, I applied to another herbalism program based in Vermont (it’s hybrid-remote), and I’ll hear back whether I’m accepted in the upcoming weeks. That program is a three year family and clinical program that educates, trains, and equips students to become herbalist clinicians; practitioners of herbal medicine. This is the first program (even though I have a BA in social and cultural anthropology and a MS in Health Promotion) that will end with me having plant medicine skills (which would have been helpful on that fateful January day back on the mountain). But it’s also one that allows for a lot of self-expression and a personal flare.

So, if all goes according to plan, in three years I’ll finally have earned an —er as a practitioner of herbalism.

But I also hope to still give magical unicorn vibes as well.

This installment of writing is very vulnerable and bit of an interlude during A History of Falling in Love. To understand the significance of the how the culmination of my three loves (Collin, Switzerland, and Tolkien) resulted in a grand adventure, it’s helpful to back up a bit and share with you the journey I’ve had with anxiety. 

Frodo: I can’t do this, Sam.

Sam: I know. It’s all wrong. By rights we shouldn’t even be here. But we are. It’s like in the great stories, Mr. Frodo. The ones that really mattered. Full of darkness and danger they were. And sometimes you didn’t want to know the end. Because how could the end be happy? How could the world go back to the way it was when so much bad had happened?

But in the end, it’s only a passing thing, this shadow. Even darkness must pass. A new day will come. And when the sun shines it will shine out the clearer. Those were the stories that stayed with you. That meant something. Even if you were too small to understand why. But I think, Mr. Frodo, I do understand. I know now. Folk in those stories had lots of chances of turning back only they didn’t. Because they were holding on to something.

Frodo: What are we holding onto, Sam? 

Sam: That there’s some good in this world, Mr. Frodo. And it’s worth fighting for. 

Due to some combination of biological (hormones, sleepless nights breastfeeding) and environmental factors (my family had just moved from Long Island, New York to Delaware prior to my birth, and my dad had shortly thereafter lost his job), when I was around 8 months old, my mom fell into a very deep and difficult postpartum depression. It was so bad that she developed aphasia and couldn’t speak for quite some time. She went to her doctor for help, but this was an era before antidepressants were readily available or doctors really understood how to support a female going through this type of depression. The first three years were the hardest for her, though she wasn’t fully recovered until I was around 9. 

What a difficult journey my mom made through that psychologically and physically painful time. She did it, though, and she never gave up. For that, I am grateful. My mom’s experience with depression and the ways it affected her, in turn, also affected me. That is because nothing happens in isolation. We are all connected.

During the years when I was between 8 months and 3 years old, my main memories are of playing alone outside in our backyard while my mom would recline on a nearby lounge chair and keep an eye on me. My sisters were at school all day, and my dad was working again by this point. So, what bit of nature we had in my 1/4 acre backyard became my playground, my toys, and my friends. There were forsythia blossoms and ink berries, and I made potions from all the natural elements I’d gather and find. I’d stir them together in my pot with a stick and live in my plane of existence where my imaginal world and the natural world overlapped. When the sunbeams hit the water from my kiddie pool just so, the most ethereal rays of light would dance on the wall of our porch. I was convinced these were fairies dancing to say hello. I wore a small blanket like a cape (and often only a small blanket like a cape) and between potion-making sessions, I would engage in flying practice. I would run back and forth across our 1/4 acre yard convinced that if I got up enough speed I’d fly. My rich, inner world and my connection to nature kept me engaged for the most part. But there was a deep loneliness that grew inside me. 

By three, I was eager to exchange my cape for some clothes, and I was ready for some friends who were more conversational than the refraction of light. The first day of preschool felt like Christmas. And so did days 2-180 of the school year. Social engagement and formal education became two of my deepest joys. I was never lonely anymore, and it felt amazing. Meanwhile, my mom was able to get more rest and feel some of her own life coming back into her being, and my dad’s new job was going well. Things were on the up and up for all of us.

But then, when I was 5, we moved to our newly built 5 bedroom house. For the first time, I had my own bedroom. My sisters, who were 9 and 12 years old at the time, were thrilled for the privacy they gained, but I hated being alone at night. I was terribly afraid of the dark. I’d lie awake at night and feel the weight of loneliness sitting on my chest. I hated how separate I felt lying in bed, aware that I was so small, so singular. I felt isolated in my own reality, and the loneliness felt like it was going to swallow me whole. All that loneliness that plagued me for those first three years came surging through my body at night time, and I was deeply afraid. Night after night, I’d spend hours afraid and trying to just wait out the night, but it was agonizing.

Unfortunately, my fear started to bleed into other areas of my life; I’d watch a movie where a character got cancer and then be terrified I was going to get cancer. I overheard on Oprah one day the high statistics of car crashes in the United States, and then I was a nervous wreck everytime I was in the car. The claustrophobia from some unfortunate incidents whereby I got accidentally locked in our garage several times when I was 2, transferred to plane rides and elevators. Everywhere my thoughts turned, they were tainted with fear, anxiety, and a feeling of helplessness. 

One day, I realized that I was tired and overwhelmed by the anxiety itself. The quote, “A coward dies a thousand deaths, a brave man dies but one” really hit home. I thought, “yes, here I am dying a thousand deaths of agonizing anxiety all day every day, and that is not better than if any of these fears actually transpired.” And furthermore, it occurred to me that life takes some measure of faith to not live in that cloud of terror. I could make up infinite scenarios of terrible things that could happen when I walk outside my door, but unless I want to resign myself to a life of terror-induced paralysis, curled up in fetal position all day, I’m going to have to have some faith that things are going to be alright. 

So, I decided: I’m facing my fears head on. I’m sleeping through the night by the time I’m 12. And so, I set my mind to reaching that goal, and I did. Rather than lie awake, keeping myself alert due to fear and anxiety, I practiced trusting that I could let myself go off duty and that things would be okay. 

If you’ve ever been anxious or fearful, you know: being brave and courageous doesn’t mean you’re not afraid. It means taking heart in the midst of fear and doing the thing anyway. Those of us who are more prone to anxiety have the unique opportunity to develop courage. And so, I took that opportunity.

I took that approach and applied it to all my fears until one day I realized that I had become quite brave and adventurous. 

By the time I was 16 and friends with Collin, I was exploring abandoned, old houses in the woods late at night, rappelling off train bridges with mildly condemned rope climbing equipment, and jumping off other 40 ft tall bridges into rivers below.

Because of this courage, I eventually went on to have some of the most extraordinary adventures. For our honeymoon, Collin and I flew to Thailand and hitch hiked and backpacked all over the country. Often we’d be in remote pockets where no one spoke English, and we weren’t entirely sure how to get where we were trying to go. I felt only exhilarated by the experience. We also hiked hundreds of miles deep into wild places like the Canadian Rockies, Patagonia, and the North Cascades in our 20s. We confronted a Grizzly Bear while it was eating an elk and we were days of hiking from civilization. I had a mild case of hypothermia at the time from crossing so many rivers in the high altitude snow fall. Another time we camped in a backpacking tent on the Masai Mara a quarter mile from our vehicle during the Wildebeest migration with lions hunting right outside out tent. They were so close we could hear them breathe. I was able to hold all of those experiences as part of the great adventure that is life itself.

With all these experiences on my life CV, I absolutely self-identifed as a courageous, adventurous person. I’d occasionally have dreams at night where I’d go back to my 2 year old self as my current self. I’d find her sitting alone, and I’d tell her all the amazing things we were going to do one day. 

For many, many years, I had no anxiety and no fear. I barely remembered what it felt like as a child to be scared. I only remembered what it felt like to be strong, brave, and adventurous. As a young mom with little kids, I’d hop in the car and drive them anywhere—even to other states for overnight adventures when Collin was busy working. Los Angeles, Arkansas, Vermont—every state and every phase of life all my courage and competence to do big things transferred with me.

And then Covid hit. And for the first two months, I was okay—even though we didn’t see anyone besides our family for weeks at a time due to living on 64 acres on top of a mountain. Vermont took Covid very seriously, and so during those months we got most our food from self-pay farm stands or CSA pick ups. Occasionally (once a month) I’d go to the grocery store and they’d deliver the food I’d ordered online into my trunk. But during these months, everyone all over the world was pretty much was isolated at home. There was a cameraderie about it. 

But then, the rest of the world started moving on, and we didn’t. Things were very strict in Vermont and we had decided to follow all the guidelines for reasons that felt very important at the time. Fortunately, my kids had their neighbor (half a mile away friend) and they bubbled up together. So the three of them had an epic experience and played outside daily. And we saw a handful of people occasionally that were in our bubble (including that particular neighbor’s family and a couple other families) but most days, I didn’t see other people for quite a long, long time. For a person who needs regular, positive social interaction to feel healthy, this left a mark. But I didn’t realize it while it was happening. I made it most of a year before I started to feel pretty topsy turvy internally. In fact, my lived experience of 2020-2021 felt pretty amazing. I loved the hygge of wintertime; I loved that the kids were playing outside only with friends because it meant they were outside every, single day. I loved that our family got even closer and made our own world up on the mountain. We went all in on our homeschooling and did all kinds of projects, read books, lived into the subjects we were learning. 

Living through an unanticipated global pandemic on top of a mountain was such a bizarre set of insular circumstances that it was hard to know that the vast amount of time removed from society was having an adverse effect until the damage was done. Not leaving our homestead except to go somewhere else very rural in Vermont (and usually just our family) for over 400 days affected me more deeply than I knew until one day I had a severe panic attack out of the blue. I was about to just take a bite of my breakfast, and something snapped. After that, panic attacks became frequent—heart racing, blurry vision, hyperventiliating—I was afraid to drive without cell service because I was terrified I’d have a panic attack and not be able to get myself back home or call Collin to help. There was little to no cell service in the entire surrounding rural area where we lived. I didn’t want my life-quality to deteriorate, but the fear coming from within felt like it was going to swallow me whole. I was able to mostly hide it from my kids, but it became increasinly difficult to do so. My family members who are licensed therapists explained to me that my severe isolatory experience caused a re-trauma of the intense loneliness that I experienced as a young child. That checked out with how I felt; it was like a dam had broken, and all the fears of my youth that I kept retained came flooding through me without restraint. 

Consequently, my world got very small as I hesitated to push out of my routine; and the smaller my world got, the sadder and more neruotic I felt. Then finally, Vermont started to re-open again; they started lifting some of the travel restrictions and social restriction guidelines. We started to see family members and friends from near and far more often.

But there was still some residual damage; some of those old fears had returned. Elevators, parking garages, tunnels, planes—elements integral to traveling—became a trigger for anxiety. I was still VERY averse to being without cell service. The feeling of being out of touch with the rest of humanity was too much after such an acute and yet enduring segment of time spent isolated from society. Anything that made me feel the potential to get lost or trapped—essentially, isolated—induced a lot of anxiety. My day to day world continued to feel small as I was only comfortable with a small routine. 

Then Collin was presented with the opportunity to start Mass Culture, and we moved back to Topanga. The infrastructure of Los Angeles—the ubiquitous cell service, easy to figure out (albeit slightly frenetic) freeways, the ability to see where you are in reference to the ocean, the mountains, the valley (versus being down in the woods and having limited visibility), and the feeling that you’re never too far from other, friendly people—this was all extremely supportive to my nervous system. I was able to start to really heal enough to go outside my routine. But just barely. I’d still have to white-knuckle it through any circumstances that put me in a situation that felt potentially isolatory (going out of cell service on a day trip outside the city, elevators, etc). 

The anxiety became a secret burden I kept under wraps. My friends would want to hike with me, and I’d always suggest the trails I knew like the back of my hand. If we went somewhere I didn’t know, I’d be supressing a panic attack the whole time. Likewise if I had to go on an elevator in a parking garage, or if I was driving somewhere where the cell service was sketchy I’d have a physiological reaction where my whole body would start shaking uncontrollably. I could barely access rational thought. 

The anxiety, though hidden from others to best of my abilities, became something heavy and exhausting that I had to carry but never wanted in the first place. The fears and cautions whispered to me in the recesses of my mind like they were there to help me, to keep me safe. It was very easy to attentuate to those fears rather than the people around me (like Collin) who would say, “You’re really going to be okay. You don’t have to be afraid” to which I’d want to reply, “Well, if I’m afraid it’s YOUR fault!” In a way, my anxiety became much like the ring. It was altogether toxic, but heavy and mine to bear. I didn’t know how to get rid of it, and it was diminishing the quality of my life. I had been happy and strong before covid; I regretted that the anxiety came back. I wish the ring had never come to me. I wished that none of the trauma had ever happened.

“So do all who live to see such times, but that is not for them to decide. All we have to decide is what to do with the time that is given to us” 

There is something indomitable about the human soul; maybe that’s the essence of Life itself. That unwillingness to give up, that drive to keep living, that will to keep reaching upward and onward—like a blade of grass growing through a crack in the concrete, we keep pushing towards light despite the obstacles and odds against us.

For me, the drive to keep trying has always been tied to Love. Across spiritual paths and traditions, the greats agree that Love is defined by a set of principles, attitudes, and behaviors. It’s a posture of the heart, one that remains humble and committed to growth. It’s the practice of being present with whatever one’s feelings are, but then making a choice to align your heart, your mind, and your life with goodness, unselfishness, generosity, forgiveness, hope, trust, and endurance. So for me, when all else feels uncertain, when my internal world is in disarray, I hitch my wagon to the star of Love. My Polaris. 

I wrote in the last post all about falling in love with Collin so young, and I know that particular path of finding and marrying your first, true love young doesn’t go well for most people. I think we were lucky, and I also think we work our asses off to stay committed to a path of Love. 

I also wrote previously about my deep connection to the Lord of the Rings and Tolkien’s creation of such a deeply moving story. The liteary arc and deeply moving, artistic mastery of that story hinges on the love and commitment of its characters for one another and for goodness per se. Each character had to rise up to their potential; to do that they had to embrace their identity at great risk and cost to themselves. That’s why it strikes such a chord with me. If Samwise would’ve thrown in the towel when Frodo harshly sent him away, the quest would have failed. If Aragorn wouldn’t have faced his fears and taken up the calling of his true destiny, all hope would have been lost. If Éowyn wouldn’t have defied the cultural limitations of what a female could contribute, the Nazgul would have survived. The success of the epic quest and the fate of good overcoming evil depended on each main character living into their potential and staying true to the path of goodness—or as I deem it—Love. 

So when we were formulating our anniversary trip plans, I didn’t want to limit our long awaited celebration to that which wouldn’t cause me anxiety. I wanted to move beyond my fears and reach towards Love.

Collin and I had talked for many years about one day returning to Switzerland together. This would require a lot of courage from me as it would require a cross country flight by myself (to meet up with Collin after he had dropped our kids off at camp in Vermont), a long transatlantic flight to Europe, and then all the unforeseen elements that traveling abroad presents (trains, tunnels, elevators, getting lost, etc). Collin didn’t want me to have to be riddled with anxiety on our celebratory trip, so he offered to stay local in California to avoid all those potential triggers. I appreciated the offer and considered it. 

But then, somewhere along the way of looking into different destinations, I happened upon a book written by a fellow Tolkien and hiking enthusiast called “Switzerland in Tolkien’s Middle Earth.” 

The book, written by M.S. Monsch, is a well researched collection of theories about the specific places in Switzerland that inspired Tolkien’s creation of Middle Earth. It is full of hiking suggestions that take you on the routes that Tolkien himself traveled when he trekked across Switzerland on his own life-changing adventure when he was just 19 years old. From Rivendell to the Misty Mountains, passing by Caradhras, to Lothlorien, and even on to Mordor and Mount Doom—this book gives maps, hiking routes, and explanations into how to experience the journey that shaped the Middle Earth (and stories therein) that affected me so deeply.

So, while I knew that I’d have less anxiety if I stayed in California, I found my courage once again. I wanted to move beyond my anxiety, towards that grand adventure that the Polaris of Love is ever guiding me towards. 

I packed my Kava Kava tea (an herbal anxiolytic), and my homemade adaptogen-infused energy bites. And with great trembling but an even greater resolve, I set out on the journey of a lifetime to celebrate my love with Collin, in our beloved Switzerland, tracing Tolkien’s steps through Middle Earth. Because I’m with Sam; there is a lot of good in this world. And it’s worth fighting for. 

Chapter 2: Unexpected Adventures

The summer that Collin and I were 16, we went to Europe for 5 weeks to help serve as junior staff for a Christian leadership training program. We spent the majority of our time in beautiful Lausanne, Switzerland, with the exception of a 10 day excursion to Sofia, Bulgaria. We thought that this program was going to be a pretty smooth operation, logistically speaking, because we had done a training school on their US base the summer prior. As it turns out, it felt quite experimental and fly-by-the-seat-of-your-pants in terms of operations and logistics. This was because the two main leaders who were put in charge were 19 year old American kids who had never run an international training program with 50 participants from all over the world. This particular summer program in Switzerland was never renewed in subsequent years due to just how many mishaps and miscalculations occured. We were some of the lucky guinea pigs who got to experience the magic of being on a badly run, peer-led summer trip with the loose mission to become better leaders. It was a circuitous path, but in the end, we achieved our stated goal. And Collin and I fell in love during the process.

There are many stories I could recount from this trip, so I’ll just stick with a few stand outs. 

For context, if we’re speaking in terms of archetypal Tolkien characters, well, Collin’s always been an Aragorn. Disguised as a ruggedly independent individual with piercings, baggy jeans, and edgy hair (he used to put his Elmer’s glue in his hair!!), he never wanted to be identified as a leader back then. But leadership has always been indelibly etched onto his soul. Heads of organizations and programs have always recruited him for leadership, despite his attempts to just do his own thing. And he may have declined the offer when he was invited to serve as staff for this program—if it hadn’t been in Switzerland AND if his role wasn’t to be the rhythm guitarist in a band they were forming for the summer. He was a talented and accomplished guitarist by 16 with a wanderlust to explore moutainous places. So, the opportunity to go to Swiss Alps to play in a band tipped the scales for him. I don’t really know how I convinced the organization to recruit me (I don’t think that’s even a thing but I’ve pulled the “put me in, coach!” approach multiple times in my life), but somehow I did convince the organizers that I’d be a good addition to this mission too. So they asked me to join the support staff (which meant that I was a glorified groupie who promoted their band all summer).

For our first three weeks in Switzerland, this newly formed band practiced playing music together, composed original songs, and then performed local shows. They were talented, and their music was a fun kind of Indie Pop/Rock (a novel thing for talented musicians of the late 90s who were more into hardcore, emo, or heavy rock). I was used to Collin’s band back at home having a melancholy, angsty vibe. Their music was beautiful and the band members extremely talented, but it was also heavy and sad content. It was really fun with this summer Indie band to get to dance and have fun to the peppy yet cleverly and skillfully composed music they performed. They put on a great show, too. The front man had massive amounts of self confidence—a perfect persona for a band—and was quite a performer. He’d create costumes out of random materials he found on the program base and then tie it into his act. One night he wore what appeared to be a very DIY astronaut suit, for example. 

All of their rehearsals and shows in Switzerland were ultimately in preparation for the band to take their music to Bulgaria during week four of the trip. We had been told that things were in a bit of a newly post-communism slump in Sofia in 1998. When we arrived, we saw what they meant. Our lodging was bleak and all too typical of the area; our building felt like something post-apocalyptic; the elevator would get stuck between floors regularly, and we’d have to pry the doors open and climb up and out. Collin would hoist himself up first, and then he’d pull us one by one up to the floor where he was. Sometimes that meant you’d be exiting on a floor without electricity and with people squatting in there. We heard gunshots outside our building every night as the local mafia would conduct business. Things felt a little grim in Sofia at that time, to say the least, so this band’s expressed purpose was to bring hope and joy to the people there with positive lyrics, cool music, and DIY costumes made of discarded items left behind on the base. The band members were up for the task—they were a bunch of talented and hilarious musicians—also, good-looking—who named their band, “King Henry and the Clotted Milk Biscuits” for reasons that escape me now. I mean, basically, it was funny. 

All that prep work in Switzerland paid off, and they hit the Bulgarian ground running. During their mere 10 days touring in Sofia, King Henry and the Clotted Milk Biscuits rose to a surprising level of fame throughout the city. Just from playing out in clubs nightly and some connections that they made in the process, the band was soon invited to the Bulgarian MTV studio for an interview and to play a live set. The whole ordeal was broadcast live on national television. During a live broadcast on tv, one girl called in to the studio to ask Collin to marry her. He politely declined. After that broadcast, hoards of obxnoxiously attractive Bulgarian girls would scream when they saw any of the band members—but especially Collin (it was that glued hair, so help me God)—and they’d chase him down and swarm him to ask for his autograph.

One of my most poignant memories from that portion of the trip, however, was the incident with Collin almost getting left behind in Bulgaria. Maybe that fangirl who wanted to marry Collin had connections with the airline…or the mafia. Whatever the case was, the main program leaders (who, as a reminder, were 19 years old) didn’t make sure there were enough boarding passes for everyone to board the return flight home. This was a different era in a different land; no one was matching passports with the names on the boarding pass, so it was not obvious that we were one short until mostly everyone had boarded the plane. So when one, 13 year-old (incidentally an aspiring magician named Justin, as I recall) was left without a boarding pass, Collin gave his to him. 

It was just the head program leader and Collin left in the airport at that point, and Collin was like, “Well, what should we do?” The leader’s response was, “I think there’s a bus that will get you back to Switzerland, man. It might go through Serbia…? Sorry, I gotta get on the plane now before it leaves.” Collin’s attempts to say, “Isn’t Serbia in the midst of a civil war?” did not reach him as he entered the jetway. In his defense, as a “missions kid” (someone who grew up on a missions organization base and going on half-baked international trips since he was born) he probably thought that was a pretty normal thing to have to navigate by age 16. However, it was not.

Meanwhile, I was sitting on the plane, unaware of this whole boarding pass situation, and getting more anxious by the minute that Collin had not boarded. I was staring at the plane door willing him to get on the plane when they closed the doors. My heart started pounding as I realized something was not right, and this plane was about to leave. Seconds later, the plane was literally rolling away from the jetway, and then started cruising towards the runway. A sense of urgency seized me, so I stood up and started screaming for the pilot/flight crew to stop the plane. My panic and distress transcended any language barriers, and—to my eternal gratitude—when I explained to the attendants that we were missing a member of our group, they relayed my message to the pilot. He stopped the plane, and as I looked out my tiny airplane window I saw a tiny golf-cart like airport vehicle racing Collin down the tarmac to the plane. Our cabin crew opened the plane door, and he had to climb up inside the plane from the vehicle. My whole heart walked into the cabin. With glued hair. And then we returned to Switzerland.

After the organized leadership program and tour de Bulgaria ended, Collin, I, and a handful of others spent a week trekking around Switzerland, sleeping by the train tracks, wild-camping in the mountains (even though it was illegal and we didn’t know that), and eventually ended up in Venice, Italy for a day before returning back to the program headquarters in Lausanne, Switzerland. Again, these adventures were in the spirit of what would eventually become trademark for our relationship—I have a whim for an inspired adventure, and Collin brings it to life. I saw back then that this 16 year old version of Collin was simultaneously the most daring and the most responsible one in our party. Dreamy combination for my adventurous yet somewhat logistically/navigationally lacking soul. 

There were also magical moments shared—ordinary and extraordinary—that comprise the memory montage I have of Collin and me falling in love. We’d walk to class together every morning, talking and laughing. Every night we’d lay out on the grass under the stars and talk and laugh some more as we witnessed countless shooting stars. During each day, we spent every waking hour together as much as possible. We started finishing each other’s sentences about the most random things; we’d fall asleep on each other’s shoulders on long train rides. For two Demi-romantic individuals (that means your romantic and physical attraction hinges on being friends first and foremost), it was beyond a dream come true. I had found my soul mate, and every day it became more real that we got each other differently than anyone else could or had. Every day, I felt myself falling a little bit more in love despite my formerly guarded and skeptical of love 16 year old self. We existed in our own orbit, and we were locked into a magnetism from that trip onward that has only gotten stronger. As close as we were that summer, and as strong as the pull was to make it official, we agreed (again, both way more responsible for our ages than our alternative, late 90’s post-grunge style led people to believe) that we wanted to keep our committment level at friendship for a while longer. We both had our own inner work we wanted to do before getting into a committed relationship with one another because we knew that once we let ourselves fully commit and fall entirely in love, there was no going back.

That summer in Switzerland expanded my mind, my heart, my reality of what could be. For a girl from Delaware where you never get more than 448 feet above sea level, the alps were gorgeous on a different scale than I had ever witnessed. I had traveled extensively in the United States, but I had never experienced quite that level of extraordinary beauty. The rocky peaks extended into the clouds, dramatically edged and defined against the deep, blue sky. Glaciers, thick, and emitting a luminescent blue color, were thickly layered across the mountains. The lakes and rivers were glacier-colored blues and greens, and they were pristine. The chocolate was superior to anything I had ever tasted. The streets were so polished that the five second rule could be extended to a five minute rule with no problems. The water fountains running along the street were channeling such pure, spring water, you could fill your water bottle right from them without a care. The weather and subsequent lush ecosystem of the valleys were also lovely during our summer there—clear, blue skies and lush green trees and meadows. Honestly, it was idyllic. The only thing better than falling in love per se, was falling in love in Switzerland. 

Over the next few days, I’ll be posting a reflection on three of my favorite things: Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings, Switzerland, and Collin. I’ll take you on a little time traveling story as I recount how these three things came to be interwoven and turned into the vacation/anniversary trip of a lifetime. The first two installments I’m posting are a history of falling in love with each, and the final will be about our recent trip to Switzerland that was a celebration of all three of these favorites.

Today, I’ll start with falling in love with Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings.

Prologue: Concerning Tolkien Fans

I was 20, and a junior in college when the Lord of the Rings movie premiered. I knew nothing about Tolkien or the story; Darby and Jason (my sister and brother-in-law) asked Collin and me if we wanted to all go see it together at the Newark Movie theatre—a cheap theatre in Delaware so sketchy that you sometimes wondered if your shoes were going to get stolen off your feet if you got a little too lost in the movie. Nevertheless, I did get lost in the movie. I was riveted. I also had no idea how intense it was going to be, and I was on the edge of my seat the entire movie. Back in those days, (I just aged at least 10 years as I typed that), they released the movies one year at a time. And this was before the internet was ubiquitous or streamlined (I aged another decade) and way before smartphones (maybe you can attend my funeral at the end of this blog since at this rate I will have died of old age). So I waited a full year to know the next installment of the story with The Two Towers. After that, I waited another full year for the Return of the King. I could’ve read the books or asked any nerd who already had read it, but I loved living in just the portion of the story that I knew at the time for each of those years. The deep truths of the storyline and the relatable, universal themes went deep into my psyche over the course of those three years.  

Then, one of the first Christmases we were married, Collin bought me a beautiful hardcover copy of the complete novel. I was so excited, and I couldn’t wait to read it. I cracked open the gorgeous elvish-designed cover, and there within lay the story that would live on within my soul forever. Soon into reading Tolkien’s eloquent literary style, I discovered that Tolkien’s love of descriptive, poetic details is a far departure from the pace of a movie directed by Peter Jackson. So I stalled out somewhere before Frodo even left the Shire, honestly. I was still a bit burnt out from undergraduate school (remember Collin and I got married a week after I graduated, so the experience of undergrad was very recent) and the fact that the anthropology major is second only to the literature major in terms of how much reading is assigned. So, I took a hiatus from any reading that took intellectual work. 

But then, one winter, many years later, I found myself living in a beautiful home in Vermont with a large, welcoming, stone hearth that held our woodstove which was ablaze with the coziest of roaring fires from late October through April. I had two snuggly little buddies at the time—much like hobbits at those ages—who loved nothing more than a cup of tea, good homemade bread and butter, and a snuggly read aloud session by the fire. I knew just the story I wanted to impart into their souls; and so we began on a literary journey that affected us all profoundly. 

We read through my beautiful hardbound copy cover to cover—the entire novel consisting of all 6 books in one binding—and I have never worked so hard to not cry as I did at the end. I managed in the end, somehow, to withhold my tears because I didn’t want to subtract from the story and interject my own feelings into it. I wanted for them to have their own feelings, their own impressions, their own experience of how the story landed for them. 

Within the next few days—possibly over a week or so—we all talked about the characters as we missed spending time with them. We digested the story together in bits and pieces as reflections and memories would arise. “Remember when Sam…?” Or “One of my favorite parts was when…” We were divided on our opinions about Gollum; I tend to take the Samwise view of Gollum, and Juniper is one hundred percent aligned with Frodo. 

And then, before too long, we all agreed: let’s read it again. After all, winters in Vermont are long, and we had nothing else demanding our time in those glorious days when they were 5 and 8. One of the best decisions I have ever made was to let go of the worry that we should be “doing more” as homeschoolers or an American family. The months we spent all cozied up reading Lord of the Rings by the fireside will live on as one of my greatest treasures in life. I know its one of Senya and Juniper’s greatest and most significant experiences of childhood too, whether consciously or subconsciously. It’s woven deep into the fabric of their beings.

So, you’d think that was where the story of our love for Lord of the Rings ends—and it could! And it would still be worthy of cherishing and planning a trip around Switzerland, retracing the journey that inspired Tolkien’s Middle Earth. But no, that is never where the experience ends with a soul that likes to live life on a mythological scale. 

Chapter 1: A Long Expected Hobbit Day

As homeschoolers, when you decide to make your life about learning and leaning into literature (or any subject, really) in an embodied way, you may find yourself inviting your fellow homeschooling friends who are equally obsessed with Tolkien’s Hobbit and LOTR books out from California to have a Hobbit Day in Vermont. And because you’re all homeschooling nerds, you may extend the idea from a day of celebration into a week-long, immersive experience living into the stories.

This meant that each day we all participated in a Waldorf-style Circle Time that my friend Jessamyn created. Jessamyn went through a Waldorf Training program to become a professional Waldorf teacher at a reputable Waldorf school in Los Angeles. When she graduated, however, she decided to homeschool her twins and apply all that mastery to homeschooling instead. So, for years we (all those of us who were lucky enough to homeschool with her) got to benefit from her expertise and gifts. When we moved away from that group in California to relocate to our mountain dream land in Vermont, we were very sad to leave her, her kids, and the group. Little did I know during our tearful goodbye that my personal favorite expression of her mastery as a Waldorf instructor would take place a year later in the gorgeous setting of our special piece of the Vermont forest during the most spectacular autumn display of foliage.  

For those of you who don’t know what a Waldorf Circle Time is (I definitely didn’t until I stumbled into that homeschool group), it involves a group of kids and adults standing in a circle, and together you go through a predetermined set of songs, verses (like poetry or rhymes), and movement (this can be a range of things but when kids are on the younger side involves acting out the actions in the songs and verses) and activities (it’s foggy now that I’m years away from it, but this is when bean bags and silk scarves usually come out)—all sneakily accomplishing all kinds of learning and motor skill development in a creative and fun way. You repeat the same Circle Time each time you get together (daily in Waldorf schools, weekly when we were doing a homeschool co-op), so that by the end of the learning block, you’ve deeply internalized the material from that particular Circle Time.

After about a week or so of daily Tolkien Circle Time, we had our big culminating event: Hobbit Day. We had an extensive repertoire of all the Hobbit Meals (Breakfast, Second Breakfast, Elevenses, Luncheon, Afternoon Tea, Dinner, and Supper). I was lead cook for the day. We had delicious menu items throughout the day, thematically named such as “Goldberry’s pie”, “Tater’s Precious”, and “Aragorn’s Athelas Tea”. There were crafts; the kids each hand sewed satchels for their quest, and they also wood-burned their names in Elvish into pieces of fallen wood that Collin harvested from our forest. Jessamyn brought these crafts from concept to reality with all four kids (including getting them all to learn to spell their names in Elvish). And then there was the quest: Collin planned a riddle-driven treasure hunt—covering a lot of our 64 acres—that led to a treasure chest of coins from Middle Earth among other things. He created all the riddles (there were many!), and he hid them all through the woods at the different spots where they would arrive as they solved each riddle. Somewhere in there we also made lanterns and went on a lantern walk at night to our secret bonfire spot deep in the woods. 

Ah, this is why it’s hard for some of us when our kids grow up and go to school, have iPhones, and want to hang out without us, not dressed as an LOTR character. But it’s all good. It truly does all have a place in the developmental richness that makes these humans into their own, rich beings. We had our Hobbit Day when we could, and it was glorious.