Doorways to Wonder

I'm opening new doorways for myself this week. I've always considered myself a spiritual person, although I certainly didn't fit into Christianity or Unitarianism or even Wicca.  But it's there! I have a strong spirit and it is growing ever stronger.

Carrie Newcomer,  a Quaker, is a voice that I find compelling.  In the past, the voices I found compelling were people like Holly Near and Cris Williamson, both for their music and their politics. Carrie strikes a more spiritual chord, although her politics are certainly admirable.  Charles de Lint is another voice who speaks to me right now. I've loved his books for years, but in starting to read some of his stories again, recently, I am feeling a kinship with his writing style and voice that I wasn't quite as aware of as before.

The burgeoning spring is always a time of awakening and yearning to explore outside the confines of my everyday world.  That piece about Wanderlust that I wrote in Idaho says it about as well as I could now. I was always drawn to a life where I could sleep rough, and live with only what I carried with me. The fact that I was never strong enough to do things like backpacking didn't halt the daydreams.  Now I dream about traversing the British Isles with a horse and vardo, traveling the lanes and beaches and moors with only my horse, my cat and my dog for company.  Emma Massingale is so much fun to watch because she does some of that!

That dream of journeying has been with me since childhood. I loved books about being in the woods or traveling on horseback, even though, in the 1960's, all the protagonists were men, and often of a different era, as well.  On long car trips across the prairies, when there really wasn't much to see, I spent hours watching the side of the highway, planning where I would guide my horse along the trails.  Hopefully, when I get on the road in my vardo, I won't be next to an Interstate!

I have pursued both worldly journeys and those of the mind and spirit. Music takes me to my most inner heart and to the tops of the Alps and the Rockies, across the Great Plains and through the desert Sahara. Books have taken me to the South Pole and to Alaska, with Ann Bancroft and others. I've explored the world of the Navaho desert southwest with Tony Hillerman and even with Chakotay! 

Collecting photographs of distant places has enabled me to recognize the cultures of the world as I do jigsaw puzzles that present me with a new place, a unique way of being, at least to my American eyes.  Whether temples in Asia or from Russian Orthodoxy, the photos enable me to travel without leaving my desk.

I remember the little girl I lived next door to one summer. About seven, she was severely impacted by Cerebral Palsy. She couldn't talk, and got around in an electric wheelchair.  She tried to follow the other children, and her younger sister, a sturdy 5-year-old, frequently had to pull the wheelchair out of some ditch it had accidentally been rammed into.  When I left that summer, I wrote each of the 3 little girls in the area a letter, so that the one little girl wouldn't stand out too much. I told her to learn to read as books could take her to places her body would never enable her to go.  I wonder if I kept a copy of that letter?   

We all have ditches we ram our chairs into, and not all of us have a sturdy sister to rescue us.  Those little girls would be in their mid-thirties now.

My other memory of those kids was the five-year-old, who was quite the firecracker.  She spent all summer calling me "Aspirin", in spite of the best efforts of her mother to correct her.  Along about August, she figured out the name and her sense of humor got the better of her -- she started calling me "Tylonal" instead!

I'm always drawn to photos of pathways, woodland roads rutted by ancient wheels, doorways that lead to a mystical world, etc.  Journeys....