Step One

I start by leaving Home. Pack up everything that grounds me in Past, prepare a backpack with only the tools and trappings of Present. Ignore Future, let her slide in and out of the room at will, and try not to speak to her.

Begin by reconnecting with roots of heart, family, blood. Fly in a bright simple line to my Brother, the single shining being with whom I share the most biology. Talk about everything. Reground in the digestion of Ideas and the nuance of Opinion. Think in the moment. Eat when hungry, sleep when tired, be entertained. Pretend I'm on vacation. Be on vacation, for a couple of days. Let the knots in my shoulders untie, unclench the fists of Anxiety, Anticipation, Interpretation. Insist on pleasure. Look at the ocean every day.

Prime my many pipes of thinking with the easy fluids of thought, word and reaction. Tune the body to sleep and wake on demand. Repack a small bag with loose clothing, warm socks, a good bar of soap. Steady, each time I remember to take a deep breath, for the cleansing obliteration of Retreat.

The Plan

In accordance with the basic patterns laid in the foundational stories of travel and transformation, I will be journeying in a circle, observing cardinal rules of three, and passing once again through landscapes long foreshadowed -- albeit at a new fractal level. The language I will observe is symbolic, the stars that will guide me are Self, Community, World. Healing within, charging these hands to heal outward, and the open heart to hold both at once.

Having tried for months now to find this progress in the small hours of the night, in one small room in my smallish hometown, I am now taking more radical steps.

At the end of July I'll fly away to my Brother's nest on the wet, wooded east coast, and roost for a while. We'll sit a retreat at the Insight Meditation Society, and bring some quiet into ourselves. Self. We'll live together and enjoy each other's company. He'll work and I'll study the next chapters of my aromatherapy course. We'll cook together and I'll cajole him into getting a library card so I can use it. We'll watch trashy movies, play in the ocean, camp a bit, and eat good things from the sea. Community. In the middle of the month I'll drive further north to the Northeast Women's Herbal Health Conference, and dip into that green witch well. Grassroots herbalism, the quietly flamboyant family of people who talk with plants. A kitchencentric health care philosophy at once revolutionary and deeply precidented. World.

In the middle of September I'll fly to the deserts of the dry, rocky west coast, and forage for a while. I'll attend an aromatherapy retreat offered by Floracopeia, and welcome the lushness of sense sensitivity well explored. Deepen my study with experience, weave into the web of healers through scent, and the herbalist activists bringing this basal bounty to every day life everywhere. Community. Then further out west to the ocean highway and some tandem time with my traveling Mother, time visiting old friends, eating duck and noodles, soaking the desert out of my pores so I am receptive for more. And then, then, then! A vision fast in the School of Lost Borders. Alone at last, out into the desert unknown, to walk right up to the crossroads and sit at that bright intersection til every piece comes rushing back. And walk, upright, through the crossroads carrying that bright peace. Self/World.

And then I'll fly home.