I am always where I need to be.
Over the years, I’ve become very adept at solo traveling. More by circumstance than by choice, but it still has offered me many opportunities for quiet reflection amidst otherwise tumultuous times. Now that I think about it, my solution to heartache and trouble is often to find a way to explore and perhaps stumble upon some reminder that things will turn out okay. I’m not the first to find balance in nature, and I surely won’t be the last. Instead of reconnecting with a long-distance lover, my week in the Pacific Northwest brought a last-minute rental car, rainy afternoons in an empty cabin, and so much natural beauty it was as if Mother Nature slapped me in the face while yelling knock it off he wasn’t worth it anyway. I hear you, loud and clear.
I was a bit nervous, not sure how wild this wilderness would actually be. I get that way, sometimes, anxious that my experience and ego will tell me I could survive whatever comes my way. When really, I always forget whether you crouch for a black bear or grow large for a grizzly. Or is it the other way around? Too late, I’m dead. It takes a certain confidence to face the scariest, most intimidating, near-death experience of eating alone at a restaurant. A table for one might as well be placed on a wooden stage in the middle of the full room with the spotlight they use for Tuesday open mic night. I hope the fact that I always order red wine and dessert when dining solo illuminates my independent woman status. I can entertain myself, thank you very much.
Outside of poisonous-snake-filled restaurants, I find solace among the trees. They stand tall, like I hope to do again someday. The silence of the forest forces me to hear my own breath, my own heartbeat, my own feet making contact with the solid, sturdy ground. When nothing else feels stable, these woods catch me. I can walk and walk until the air is dark, and I am not scared because the light will come again. I watched the tides roll out into the Pacific, revealing an entire world of shelled creatures content with life on the side of that rock. Oh, to be a shelled creature. The forceful wind so strong and constant that holding on to this huge rock is all you can do to survive.
For two nights, I slept in a yurt on a bay on an island. It was a new moon, and the first storm of the season passed through during my stay. There was no electricity in the yurt, and I shared the space with a tiny mouse intent on eating the entire apple core on my bedside table. In complete darkness, I sat in bed, enveloped with four comforters to keep me warm. The rain and the wind forced the cloth windows to beat like drum majors against the walls. I imagined buckets and buckets of water pouring down on my yurt, in the darkness, with my mouse friend. All of the energy in the rain and the wind and the moon allowed me to release whatever it was I was holding on to. It all washed away that night, my fear and my loneliness, my doubt and my anger, my tears joining the storm. We emerged the next morning, full; mouse from the apple and me from my self.
Pacific Northwest, October 2017
Kelly Green Guilbeau 