Where Am I?

I have been back in Seattle for 10 days or so. That's a day for every week I was gone, come to think of it. They say that when you end a relationship it takes something like one month for every year that you were together to recover from the break up. After 10 days home, I feel like I am finally recovering from the end of my "world tour".

My jet lag hung on for over a week. Concentration only now seems to be speaking to me again. And last night was the first time I did not wake up and wonder where I was.

It is strange. I never woke up on the road and wondered where I was. Not once. Despite the regular change of local. But here, in my house, the bed that I have slept in for 5 years has felt totally alien, exquisitely comfortable, but alien. It is as if my body came home on the 29th of June, but my soul is only just now arriving.

I am excited to get down to the business of telling you stories, sharing photos. I just have to shuffle through the logistics of returning to a house and job that I have left behind for three months. I had to get my hot water heater fixed almost as soon as I came off the plane. My computer decided it didn't want all the photos from my trip and then decided that it really wanted 3 different copies of all those pictures....that's a lot of memory...so now I have to have my computer repaired, before I lose all my pictures. I have to turn my teaching brain back on & figure out how to teach physical comedy to 5 middle school kids. I have to stop driving over the curb when I turn corners. The dog needs to go to the vet and the yard needs to be unearthed from the morning glory that seems to have eaten everything in sight.

As mundane as all that sounds, I really am finding some comfort and even wonder in it all. It relates to a promise wrapped in a wish that I had while I was on Iona. As I was contemplating what my trip was about and what it is I want to manifest in my life from this point forward, well, That point forward technically, I looked over to see a couple walk down to the beach. Without thinking I said out loud to myself, "well, that's one thing. I am done being alone. I am finished being lonely." I thought I was talking about romance.

But as soon as I returned to Seattle, after a lovely week in New York with my brother and his family, to the lovely house that blesses me with it's shelter and warmth, and to my two fantastic house-mates, Cora and Alyssa, something had shifted. I realized how much love and family and support was jam packed into my life. As I have slowly started visiting friends and family the connective tissue is stronger, more solid. I feel no lack. I feel only blessings. I feel surrounded with love.

I have not felt lonely or alone for even a second since I left Iona.

So, where am I? It would seem that I am Home.

Re-Entry

Today is the day. The day I finally go home to Seattle, the house, the pets, the wonderful friends and roommates, bills, work, an overgrown garden, driving, my own bed.

I have been in New York City for the last five days, hanging out with family, in a city I know. So, it is like I have still been traveling, but not, home, but not HOME. It feels a little bit like I have been re-entering the atmosphere gradually, re-acclimatizing myself to the familiar, fighting and reveling in the pull of gravity, i.e. easy access to the internet and long non-international calling rates calls to friends.

So much happened on the journey of the last 10 or so weeks that I haven't been able to share with you yet, but I think I have conveyed the truly miraculous wonder and daily experience of having my heart opened more and more by the beauty and wisdom of this Earth and the people who live on it. This trip was everything I wanted it to be. It was expansive and expanding. And I go home tonight feeling as if the work that needed to be done, the work that called me to travel at this time and to those places was done.

It was easy work.

Re-entry to the everyday of "normal" life, that's the challenge. Keeping the heart and mind open and expansive amidst the people and places I THINK I know, is, perhaps, even greater work. And by "work" I mean, "privilege" and "joy", as well as, an endeavor to be diligent in pursuing. I don't expect this to be "hard" work, but I know that it requires presence and stillness and curiosity. It takes the courage to approach the daily existence I left behind with the same sense of adventure and joy as I approached the world on my European trip, and without preconceived notions of what my daily life is, who the players are. Every friend, aquaintance, co-worker I encounter at home deserves to be met with the same curiosity I afforded strangers on my trip. Each day, deserves the same wonder. It is my hope that I can stand in the kitchen of my house, or the classroom I will teach in and say with the same sense of awe that I held in my heart while standing in the coliseum in Rome, "I can't believe I am standing here. How amazing. How lucky!"