On My Pilgrimage
As my mother before me and her mother before her
I grow restless
The real wounds
The ones that cut deep enough for my past to leak out
Are always the ones that make me run
Test myself
Knocking on my bones
“Is the structure sound?”
I board a plane to anywhere but home, yet find myself… home.
The California sky greets me like an old friend
It feels safe to be alone here
To get lost here
To heal here
The salt on my skin as I ascend thousands of vertical feet tastes like the salt in the air as I wander along the sea tastes like the salt he rubbed into all the unhealed parts of my soul.
Maybe I’m like San Francisco.
Just an excursion he didn’t plan on
But oh, how he smiles when my waves meet his legs; he’s wandered close enough for me to touch again
It’s ok. His pants will dry in the car. He’ll wash the sand from his socks.
Like his footprints in the sand
Maybe enough salt water and the evidence will be washed away
And maybe San Francisco never happened
But maybe he was only meant to graze the surface of my existence, like Bria and Christian
Passersby with no obligation to the future, but what a delight to have met them.
(I would have died on that mountain had we not.)
It could be that life is Yosemite Valley. So easy to lose the trail. But the things I found when I was lost were better than anything I’d set out to find from the beginning.
Coffee sipped seaside was so very reminiscent of every time I tried to enjoy “now”, but kept scanning the horizon for “what now?”
Because maybe like the brown bears in the sequoias, I am to stay wild and others ought to be warned not to feed me.
But I was hungry and he was naive and now I’m hoping someone else might have a scrap of love for me to chew on.
No. I am Bixby bridge and you’re not meant to stay for long. I’ll help you across and you’ll leave me in the rearview mirror with nothing but a selfie as a memento and that swell in your chest when you first gazed upon me won’t ever fill your lungs quite the same.
She tells me that two things can be true at the same time, but my cell signal at Bridalveil isn’t strong enough for me to launch into dissent.
Not that her words don’t echo long into my 4 mile climb into the rugged mountains of Big Sur that kiss the roaring waves of the Pacific.
Salt and sun
Fire and Water
Sorrow and wonder
A seed that ruptures into new life
And I’ll take root and grow once again.
But maybe like the streets of Fresno, a familiar grunge that feels like 10-years-old catching a football from my brother, the foundation is never really erased
The flowers and the trees and the succulents just keep finding enough water to flourish all around me.
And it could be that the same wisdom keeping me from jumping into the ocean from the shores of Bonny Doon beach where the riptides violently grasped my ankles with a roaring insistence
Will be the wisdom I’ve built bigger the next time he says
“I miss you.”
So much to discover
So many secret halls in my childhood home.
Maybe like descending the rocky bed at the bottom of the falls, I’ll remember to slow down as I end my journey. Look up and back to remember where I’ve come from and what I’ve achieved; it really puts how much still lies ahead in a different perspective.
The structure is sound.
And now my bones will carry me home.