People are more important than travel, but travel is like breathing for the soul. Matt Haig says that movement is necessary for getting unstuck, for un-caging your heavy mind. And he’s right. There is something grounding about taking to the sky.
I wanted to drive here, take a month to see roads in places I had never breathed, but God saw things differently. He always does. When He gave me roots, grafted me in to the grapevine, if you will, I stopped asking Him when I would move. In the past couple of years He has taught me a new word - stay - and now that’s what it sounds like to exhale. So He needed me to be in Texas longer than I wanted to be, and July has meant heat and healing and happiness I couldn’t have imagined.
Then my heart started itching, and my brain forgot some things about reality. This happens sometimes. So on Sunday I woke up thinking that I might seep through the cracks of reality like quicksand. And that’s when I knew that I needed to get my mind unstuck.
I know a lot of people who get motion sickness, and I’ve seen them squirm on long car rides and close their eyes tight on Disneyland rides because something about the motion makes the ties around their stomach come loose. I have the opposite problem - non-motion sickness. I must constantly be moving. I started noticing this when panic disorder was at its peak in me, and I would only calm down in rocking chairs and fast moving water vehicles and carousels.
This might surprise you if you’ve met my soul because my soul is still. My eyes are constantly giving away the secret calm in me, the deep waters without waves, the quiet cave where my mind sits with words and ideas and hope. Maybe this is why I often feel stuck, like a string weighted with a heaviness like a wrecking ball that was created to break down walls with a momentum unparalleled. I am potential energy waiting to be acted upon so that I might become unstuck - and in my unsticking cause the world around me to shift.
So that’s why I’m here, hoping that Portland will push me, wishing to breathe in words like whimsy and restore and now so that the staying has more breath support. There are songs and poems and novels written in the cracks of the sidewalks here, and I want to read as many of them as I can.
There are stories in the cracks in you, too, and that’s why I know Jamie Tworkowski was right when he said that people are more important than travel. Just give me a week every now and then to feel my legs move, and I’ll come right back to continue reading your story already in progress. Jamie also told me that today is the best place to be, so wait for me there - in the place called today - I promise I’ll be there soon.