Homecoming: Exploring a New Self in an Old Place

I walk along a wind-whipped beach, sand soft beneath my feet, gulls laughing overhead, and imagine what it will be like in a week, after four years on the nomad road, to be home, again. Trepidation bubbles as the ocean roars. I strike a barefoot warrior pose and wonder: how to preserve my gypsy spirit back in the big city, Washington, DC – inside the belly of the beast?

When I first hit the road in June of 2021, I was really only meant to be gone for a year. I rented out my house, put my business on hold, and took-off. Well, it wasn’t quite that easy. It was six months in the planning and preparing. There were fits and starts. Within two months of departure, I’d landed in an emergency room with a debilitating back flareup. The surgeon’s prognosis was dire: a spinal fusion was necessary to prevent further dangerous degradation.

It was a fraught time - months spent bedridden in my basement apartment, riddled with pain, swirling in fear, sabbatical dream slipping through my fingers. But I could not let it: I made the difficult yet divine decision to pack-up and go, again, escaping the surgeon’s scalpel and the one-year recovery that went with such radical surgery.  

Away from the urban rat race, on a cross-country journey, I would take healing into my own hands. That was the vision. Then, once on the road, year after year, I was never ready to come back in. I was learning, growing, writing, and slowly, gradually, healing – as I traveled further and further from the life I’d left behind.

Perhaps I was in search of something I had not quite yet found.

Hiking the canyons of southwest Utah – soaking in the hot springs of Pagosa – swimming the rivers of Western Carolina and the ocean off the Assateague barrier island – chanting with Shaman in Santa Fe...

Haha, of course, I was searching for my self. That’s why it took so long!

By year four, I may have found her – parts I really like – her sense of adventure, her creative spirit, her gravitation toward joy – walking a deserted beach singing aloud to the sea, to the sand pipers, to the moon rising in the cloudless sky above.

Over these years, I’ve discovered a way to come back to me.

Systems analyst Beltway bandit turned yoga teacher creative writer, I’ve changed my name. I go by my watery middle name, Marina – more befitting the flowy gypsy in me. And I’m afraid as hell of losing her back in the big city.

How do I preserve this new self in an old realm? The bureaucrat in me knows I need a strategy. In fact, all selves – analyst, writer, yogini – are in cahoots to help me. Here’s the 3-point plan they have conjured, employing tools we’ve honed on the nomad road.

• First, be grateful for all I have. Times, along the solo journey, when I was lonely, lost, stressed or in pain, I said my gratitude prayers at night, thanking the universe for all I did have – a bed beneath me, a roof over my head, my breath, my health, my muse, Google maps! I know how lucky I am, especially in these tumultuous times, where many are being unjustly separated from their lives, to have a home and community to come back to. I had a yoga teacher once say: “Be grateful for even things you don’t have; they may come to you.”

  
  

• Second, preserve the sense of adventure. Just like pulling off the highway into a new town, I can arrive into DC as if for the first time, remaining open to discover new places – new friends – new purpose – in this old realm. Museums I’ve never visited – trails I’ve never hiked – people just waiting to meet me, and I them. Most compelling, a worthy fight to #freedc and our country from tyranny. Talk about an adventure!

• Third, choose faith over fear. When I say faith, I don’t mean it in a religious way. I mean the capacity to trust myself and the universe to guide me where I need to go. Arriving at myriad cross-roads on the nomad journey, there was rarely an obvious direction to take. And oh, could I toil – east, west, north, south – pick a way, any way I often had reprimand myself. After 1000 or so of those moments over the nomad years, I’ve gotten a little closer to trusting myself – choosing faith over fear. I’ll need this skill back home, where the helicopters swirl overhead and the National Guard patrols the Metro and masked men snatch people off the streets. But that’s not all: the people are rising up and showing up and screaming for our Democracy. That’s what I choose to be part of.

What if returning to Washington is the Divine path? Like the myth of The Alchemist – the protagonist circles the earth in search of the treasure – only to discover, once back home, it’s buried in her own backyard. Better get my shovel out and start digging!

Then…let’s have a homecoming party.

Reflection: 

• How can you explore a ‘new self’ in an ‘old place’?

  
  

• What qualities will your new self embody?

  
  

• What attitudes or habits might you have to let go of?