Homeless

Traveling the country and staying as a guest at my sister and brother-n-law’s house, I feel somewhat homeless. Now the truth is that I am not homeless as many are in this country. I have resources and support and assistance if I need it. But the sense of being rootless is very apparent to me.

I often go looking for things. During my road trip I had to remember what bag things were in or if I had even brought the item with me. At my sister’s house, I have a great room all to myself but many things I brought along are under the bed. I seem to spend a lot of time searching for things. I don’t have a home for books or papers or some of my clothes. The feeling of having to search for everyday items is tiring and unsettling.

Homeless also means that my environment is not familiar. Even though I grew up in New Jersey, I haven’t lived here since I was eighteen. I don’t know how to get places. I need a map. The way people talk is different and ways of doing things are different. Each place I visited on my road trip pointed out to me that I was not at home.

The good thing about being homeless is that I experience my life and reactions to things in a new way. My mind and heart opens and I find myself more open to seeing life and possibilities in a new way. When I can stay in that mind set then being on this adventure is energizing and enlightening.

Some days though, I crave something familiar, something to comfort me. I meet someone who has been to Seattle and all I want to do is talk with them about the place I love. I want to have my belongings neat and tidy and in places I can get to easily and consistently.

The desire for adventure and newness conflicts with the yearning for comfort and familiarity. I love meeting new people and at the same time I want to see my friends and daughter. I change my moods about three times a day. Transition seems to be the norm.

All these different feelings seem to reflect an interior reality as well. I am on this adventure internally as well and there I find how much I love the new ways of thinking and feeling and at the same time I pray that I will be comfortable inside and I am not. My ways of being are changing and I feel uneasy and excited and lonely and alive all at the same time. Ultimately, the sense of home has to settle within. I have to have faith that it will.

Doldrums

Definition: A belt of calm and light baffling winds north of the equator between the northern and southern trade winds in the Atlantic and Pacific oceans.

I found out recently where the word doldrums comes from. It is a sailing term. The winds just stop, they are “calm and baffling” I am in the doldrums!

It started a week or so ago. Just as I was leaving with my sister to go to Key West it hit. No energy, no wind. I talked with a friend who has a brother who sails and found out more about this nautical term. He and his wife had experienced the doldrums while sailing to Hawaii.

When the winds stopped there was nothing they could do. They just had to wait. Then they noticed that the sea became smooth as a quiet lake and oil from other ships began to collect since there was no wind to move the water. Ocean junk appeared as well. Debris and stuff that normally would move on by or be turned under by waves appeared against the boat. The doldrums happen at a junction: between the Northern and Southern Hemisphere - at a turning point. They were powerless to make the wind come. They had to wait.

I imagine that they contented themselves with the wait some of the time and at other times were frustrated by it. I know it went on for days. Reading books and doing maintenance tasks occupied them but they really wanted to be sailing – sailing to Hawaii. The destination was interrupted, the journey stalled.

That’s where I am today. Stalled. It was so clear to me when I left Seattle: drive the country, go to Bisbee, AZ., attend my reunion, a driving trip with my daughter and then going all the way to Key West, FL – the end of the continental US. I was thinking ‘journey’ but now I see I was more about ‘destination’.

Now what? The doldrums. I cannot force a next step in this adventure. I have gone as far as my driving headlights could see on a dark night. I want to find a big motor and MAKE the wind come. I don’t want to do maintenance or look at my junk that comes up in me as I sit. I want to be about what’s next, the next destination.

And yet this is what is and so I must find a way to accept it and live with it until the winds of the next change come. This doldrums is part of the experience. I need to embrace the journey.

The winds will come – they always do. The weather changes, the days grow longer and then shorter and then longer again. It’s life and I hope that on this adventure I really embrace that truth more and relax, smile, read a book or take a walk ,or send an email while I wait out the doldrums. If I can remember the natical term perhaps I will remember that the doldrums happen at the turning point between two great things. I just have to wait.

Update June 11, 2007

I can’t believe I haven’t posted anything since June 1!! The picture here is of my friends from Seattle that I met up with in Boston for quick trip!

The end of May was filled with getting my daughter packed up from school and a trip to Chicago with her. A road trip with someone was a new thing and I liked it! We traveled through PA and then to Akron, Ohio for our first night. We stayed in the Quaker Oats factory that had been converted into a hotel. The rooms were in the old silos and ROUND! It was fun. Ohio was very flat to Rachel who is used to the mountains and hills of the Northwest.

From Akron we traveled on small state roads to Lake Erie and then onto Indiana where we spent the night in Michigan City. Rachel got to see her first two Great Lakes in one day. The next day we were on to Ann Arbor to see a roommate of hers from school and see the town. It is a fun college town and we had a great lunch at Zimmerman’s deli. Go if you have the chance.

Off to Chicago for the Art Institute. We had planned the trip around going to this wonderful art museum and we were not disappointed! We spent five hours there and still did not see everything! Thankfully it was rainy out so we didn’t miss being in the sun. The next day we spent walking the magnificent mile of Michigan Ave. and visiting with Rachel’s childhood friend who attends the University of Chicago. I loved seeing her life and yet yearned to be back in that student life – although the crammed student apartment didn’t appeal.

I put Rachel on a plane back to Seattle and then I traveled through Indiana to Kentucky. It’s the last state for me – now I have all 50. It is beautiful there but I must admit it was the first state I visited on this trip where I felt odd and uncomfortable as a woman alone. Perhaps if I had spent time in the cities of Louisville or Lexington I might not have but in the country areas – I felt that I was being looked at often. I didn’t like that.

Since returning from that trip I have been helping my sister and enjoying NJ. I have discovered though that the NE fondness for conversational arguing just for the sake of arguing is not fun for me – I want to get away from it. The fireflies though have started and I love them and we have had some great thunderstorms. We also went to a small town display of fireworks that the volunteer firedepartment put on - beautiful and very homey.

The best storm (and the scariest) came while driving to Boston. Last week, on a lark, I drove to Boston to see friends from Seattle who were there for a child’s graduation from Law School. I drove through the most incredible storm – 40 miles of thunder and lightning and hail! I had to pull over once and then crawl at 10-20 miles per hour for some time. That wasn’t even the most exciting part of the trip!

While approaching the Tappen Zee bridge in New York state (near Bear Mtn) A BEAR ran across all four lanes of the highway!!! I gasped as I saw it and then feared the bear would be hit and then relieved when it wasn’t and then scared that the cars and trucks in front of me who braked to avoid it would then hit each other and I would hit them! Wow, it was the most exciting and scary driving day of my whole trip!

Today I am writing from Ft.Lauderdale , Fl. My sister and I found cheap flights (cheaper than driving) and decided to head south so I could fulfill a long time dream to go to Key West. It’s as far away from Seattle as I can get and still be in the US. We will drive there tomorrow so I will write more about the trip then.

I miss everyone I love a lot right now. I promise to write more and stay connected. I love to hear from you all.

Thanks, Libbie

Reunion

One of the main reasons for setting out on my adventure this year was connected to my 35th high school reunion. Now that reunion is past and I find myself still sorting through it. Why was it so important to go? What did I expect and what did I receive?

I went to a small all girls’ prep school in New Jersey. I entered in the fall of 1968 – a year after the summer of love in San Francisco. Yet in New Jersey, at my school, we were required to wear uniforms and the head of the school would make you knee in front of her to show that your skirt was not above your knees!

Huge changes were rumbling around the world. John Kennedy was gone, so too Martin Luther King and Bobbie Kennedy and yet in the bubble of the school that first year of high school it might have been the fifties for the way we thought of ourselves and the world. We were privileged white girls (we did have the first black student in our class). We expected we would always want to wear penny loafers and Peter Pan collar dresses and go on to college for our Mrs. Degree.

In the four years of high school everything changed for us and for the world. The shootings at Kent State happened, Woodstock happened, and we began to find our voices with the first Earth Day, protesting the Vietnam War, arguing about uniforms, and experimenting with drugs at school. I have some sympathy for the administration that I don’t think ever saw what was coming.


Thirty-five years later, the women who came to the reunion were a fabulous gathering of accomplished women – not all in usual ways. In our class there are doctors and businesswomen,professors annd educators of colleges ad universities, artists, whale researchers and mothers, financial wizards and explorers. Somehow in the turbulent growing up time we managed to expand and develop unique lives. We were still breaking the rules as we had done in high school.

Our class had been known to do that – break rules and so even at the reunion when we were all being ‘too loud’ while speeches were going on, we found ourselves being told to be quiet by older class groups. We chose instead to move to another part of the campus and keep talking. We shared stories how what an amazing time in history that we had been in school and how it had affected us. We had such a wide range of experiences; the pretenses of impressing each other were past.

Why was it important to go? I think I needed to know that I wasn’t crazy – that the time of being in high school had been important. I needed to see others having had made unique choices that didn’t fit the norm – it seemed like we had never fit the norm then and still didn’t now. I got to talk with kind and concerned women – to see us alive and kicking – still very much on a path of growth and change – there was no slinking off into old age for us. We got to celebrate our roots and be thrilled to see the changes at the school. No longer was there just one student of color – now there were faces of many different hues. One of our classmate’s daughters goes to the school now – the only legacy from our class. She is a bright, thoughtful girl who was so glad to meet her Mom’s friends and hear about the ‘old’ days. I left with hope that another generation of women could learn to make their way on their own terms- whatever they wanted them to be. I also felt inspired to keep breaking the rules and finding my own true way and being thankful for a place that I didn’t think set out to teach me that but in fact had.