Jul 17 • Writing Sparks
Shredding the Map
Hi writers!
Did you ever have a map whose directions you no longer wanted to follow? Have you ever shredded one map and invented another? What do we do when our internal compass points one way, but society's compass points another??
🌈🌈🌈
On Saturday, I’m turning 51. At this time last year, I was hosting 2 multi-day retreats, moving out of the house I’d just moved into, getting a divorce from my husband, falling in love with a woman, sleeping in the trees, dancing around fires, and searching far and wide to collect fragments of my scattered self hidden amongst the rubble.
The year that followed was one of the most excruciating —and beautiful— of my life. I shredded the map I had drawn for myself and in its place received a murky crystal ball that’s refused to show me more than one step ahead.
But each time I’ve taken that one step off a bottomless ledge, a hot air balloon or a flying trapeze or a wild turkey vulture swoop by and give me a lift. I have been offered sanctuary for days or weeks or months in the homes of extraordinary women. I have flown to far flung cities of this country, and all over the lush green state of Virginia—from the Chesapeake Bay to the Rappahannock to where I am currently, the mighty James River.
I’ve been turned inside out, grieved, shedded, molted, lost a thousand skins. I also feel new growth—wings and a tail growing through my spine, deeper knowings and insights flooding in, a fierce new love I couldn’t have fathomed, parts of myself that would have stayed in the dark if I hadn’t decided to tear up the old map and take the plunge.
On Saturday I’m turning 51. I still don’t know where I’m going next, or what it will look like, or how it will happen— or when! But I do know when I follow the sure quiet voice of my heart, I am led somewhere better than I could have ever imagined.
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Shredding the Map
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