Leaving Home to Wander

When living on the road might be an adventure & an unmooring.

In 72 days, we will have sold most of our things, and the rest will be in storage. The residence we have occupied for seven years will belong to another family. Our home will not be located within a structure in a town in Canada’s first national park, but within our bodies. I will leave the place where the mountains have heretofore asked for reciprocity, and enter new domains, where I don’t know the other-than-humans. We will be living in an adventure, on the road.

We imagine that this will not be a permanent state. Perhaps it’s the most permanent state and we have instead been using the things we own to prop up our illusions. The thing is, we will wander until we require more structure. Or until the money runs out. Or until someone needs us to be more physically present for them. Whenever that is.

We have done this before, but not through desire of wandering. Instead, it happened through a time of trauma. Almost two decades ago, after Richard’s identity disappeared following a surgery for cancer, we wandered in southern California, then in Brittany in France, waiting for something to indicate where we might live next. While we ordered egg and sausage galettes at the market, or followed a crowd to an opera in someone’s living room, or hiked the Path of the Gods near the Amalfi Coast, we waited for a sign that we ought to be somewhere else. Let me correct, while I waited for a sign, because my partner is nearly always happy and present right where he is. Bastard.

During these months of wandering in my past, I learned how to be very, very quiet. I entertained family and friends who came to visit. I learned that some people really use travel as a form of staying drunk. And I discovered that going to other places wouldn’t protect me from making mistakes. I would navigate poorly, overspend on a hotel, lose my shit. (But I would never, ever have a bad meal, because I am the most intuitive finder of delicious food that I have ever known.)

Swooning in Venice, 2011, image by Dylan Bandy, https://www.instagram.com/ddylanbbandy/

I have been thinking that in letting go of all of this rootedness at once I might be making a disaster of my life. I was reflecting on my nearly lifelong preoccupation with being a fuck-up, when I came across Holly Whittaker saying this in a recent newsletter:

We forget the only way we find out what we do want is often enough found only through all that we don’t, or lives that we actually want to live come only after we’ve lived through the ones we didn’t, or that the will to choose rightly for ourselves only comes from information received from choosing wrongly, and sometimes that means choosing wrongly over and over and over again, and even making a disaster of your life, and even making a disaster of your life for longer than anyone is comfortable with. And so on.

Cultivating a prolific sense of possible misjudgments made me aware of the times I spent in therapy reflecting about my obsession with getting things right, and of eventually developing a rock-solid awareness about what a lovable fuck-up I actually am. Then I fell into nonduality and realized that whatever the world is, it is real. My irrationality is real; the monsters I dream of at night are real. There is a reality to experience. Our mind is something that is real, and its reality is consciousness. While every experience is valid, there is no way to be right, or great, or the best possible [fill in your role here,] because all of that is comparative. It exists inside a kind of capitalist productive mindset I no longer wish to hold. Instead, there’s a way to notice what’s appearing, and to contemplate who am I? and for me, that may be the most real version of the self. I tend to gravitate toward experiences that allow me open-minded holding of this question, and this summer, surrendering most of my former sense of home will set up the conditions to ask it.

We are wandering about for a time. We do not know where we are going exactly, but we hope to know one day soon. We have no idea if we will return to a place we have lived before or enter a new place. There is, as the elders say, more to be revealed. I no longer think that finding what’s right or wrong is the most interesting question. All of the rules that I’ve known have been disproven. I don’t even believe that where I live matters. Another question I’m asking now is: how would my life look different if I allowed in the support of all of the ones who live here? And in order to know this, I’m tracking all of the ways that I deny myself care, encouragement, collaboration, resources, rest. And the ways that I allow support too. (This week, I’m house sitting for a friend on an island in British Columbia while I finish my book, so I am getting very good at accepting gifts.)

I want you to know that I made up this wandering idea for this newsletter before this wild unmooring happened. Be careful about what you wish to write, for it can exist for you.

After August 1^st, I hope to post some findings on the question of finding support from wherever I end up in my own, personal Wanderland. In the meantime, I’ll be back every two weeks, with some incredible interviews with writers I love, and more bodacious notions of wandering.

Panini in Rome, Image by David Ramirez.

Some things I’ve been reading and thinking about:

Austin Channing Brown & the Bridge Poem.

When I am moving away from home, I become obsessed about physical homes, including all kinds of camper vans, home libraries, outdoor beds and porch living. Here’s a fine set of cottage dream life to follow. Here’s another about living inside & outdoors.

The Book on Fire podcast takes on The Dawn of Everything. This conversation is like having friends over for an intimate dinner party and talking about a book about which you have complicated views.

I’m nearly always writing a script in my head for Melanie Lynskey, Kathryn Hahn & Merritt Wever to act in. Because wouldn’t they make a fucking incredible story?

Can democracy die under the new conservatism?

Maybe, like me, you’re a control enthusiast and you need an occasional change of heart. Here’s one for the practical minded, and for the philosophical-minded, I suggest: Who could be the one who could get it or lose it?

My memoir.

My podcast with my kid.

My Instagram.

My website.