Take the midnight train going anywhere.
We are on the move. We sold our home in June and are getting on the road without another home to come back to. So, here we are. In the midst of selling and giving away many of our things—furniture, clothing, office supplies, holiday décor, childhood loves, recreational gear, art, even things my parents gave us and that we’ve kept out of sentimentality.
Banff is a good place to come hang out for a year or a few years, work in tourism, and ski and hike in an iconic mountain destination. We’ve done it twice, once through the eighties, and now for the past seven years. But like anywhere, there are tragedies and things that rearrange your notions of what community can be. This summer a staff lodge housing 200 young people burned to the ground at Lake Louise. Kids from all over the world lost everything, even their visas and passports. On the day we heard about the fire, we ran into a few of them at a local bakery that was donating lunch. The kids looked teary and tired.
I came home and we went through our closets in about 20 minutes. The next day we delivered what the young people most needed—hiking boots, backpacks, cosmetics, bedding, clothing. The community we live in provided so much support that within a few days, the young people had been supplied with goods, and $400 in cash for each one to buy the rest. Afterward, reflecting on the ease of the giveaway, I was amazed that I didn’t perseverate over stuff I had once adored but honestly didn’t truly need. The emergency motivated us. Need is subjective. Like the teacher, Byron Katie has said, “All I have is all I need and all I need is all I have in this moment.” When things get a whole lot more intense, I hope I remember this.
These past weeks, it’s been good to place things in boxes in the garage and invite friends and their families to come in to find what they like. I have a few collections of things that are dear to me, and which will be packed to go to the next home—rocks found on the trail, my grandmother’s recipes and rosaries, a dozen Tarot decks, some vintage hats, a few journals, a few hundred books (I know, but I think of this as a necessary indulgence, they’re ones that I’ll read again and again.) But mostly my desire in this third act of life is to live on less and give away more.
It’s nearly always been a thrill to give, and a joy to receive. When I first moved to Canada at eight years old, I came home after school to make a snack of crackers and peanut butter. Finding my siblings away, and having made more than I could eat, I took them to the neighbor’s house, who laughed and indulged me by tasting my creations. This elder told this story to my mother many times afterward. I can still find how natural and easy it was to think of not wasting a thing. This family story reminds me of Gabrielle Hamilton’s memoir, Blood, Bones, and Butter, in which she writes about her great desire to make odds-and-ends that people believe are cast-offs into delicious food. When I visited my youngest in New York, they took me to Hamilton’s restaurant Prune for breakfast, and I scraped up everything on that plate, including the garnish, and Hamilton smiled seeing my ardor.
We are privileged to own a home, to have placed our objects in a way that makes sense to us, to think about making others feel comfortable here, to have cupboards for all the things that we needed to store. But now, we are placing what we choose to own in storage while we travel. We are contemplating what’s next. Not knowing what’s ahead makes every decision more complicated. That’s the learning experience of suspending, of reimagining existence down to what I carry in my body and in my interactions, (and to have my stuff limited to what I drag around in a really decent suitcase with those adorable organizing cubes. I still dream of order.)
When my partner, Richard, was a teenager, his home burned down. Lately, we’ve been in conversation about how trauma and unexpected events can shape experiences of acquisition and loss. The effect on him, and then on our partnership, has been to hold things lightly, to not procure too much stuff, and to sustain relationships as deeply as we can. After his brain injury and an awakening experience inside a preferenceless identity, we no longer expect our former selves to remain intact. Travel might initiate this revolution. We invented this experiment so we might see what happens when there isn’t a tether to any particular future.
The reason I bring up the desire to give is not to make myself feel generous, but instead, to follow this kind of approach where everything might be well-used. To suggest (to myself first,) that we might contemplate what we amass, and what it might cost us in life force. Here in our home, we are entering this way of moving things to others because we are becoming more nomadic for a while, but whole societies in our past and present have bartered, shared, and offered up in potlach and yule and other ceremonies their acquisitions. This consideration for giving up what is certainly for most middle-class folks a small share of an abundance is more than a check against capitalism. The gift economy is a move against what author Zoe Todd (Métis/otipemisiw) calls the fiction of the Doctrine of Discovery—that which asserts a sovereignty over forests, rivers, lakes, glaciers, mountains, coasts, and oceans.
Possessions become a hindrance not only to our capacity for change but cut us off from truly entering our entire human and nonhuman community. Whether in our families or towns or nation-states, we can surely witness how status objects assert importance and meaning that can end real relationships across class and enact violence against nature. As Todd says, “In a white settler-colonial capitalist framework, “not life” encompasses those beings not considered to be animate or alive, including rocks, waters, lands, atmospheres, and, indeed, ancient fossil beings.” So, how would my entire way of existence become less extractive if this division of life and not life wasn’t at the center of what we consider intelligence? What would happen to our need for an economy run on fossil fuels if we didn’t have to own all the things? I have few answers. I am learning.
These days, it isn’t seeing bags of stuff leave our home that has ignited fears, but wanting to stay allied with the wilderness and the people who have offered kinship here. I’m going out on hikes and wondering how long it might be until I see this mountain again. He’s walking into our home after a day of work and sighing at its striking beauty. We’re both filled with wonder at the fresh, cool wind that comes sliding from the peaks into the valley and then through our bedroom window. Our recent conversations have led us to places where we urge each other to stay open to possibility, to avoid too much planning, to see if being destabilized might be a very creative proposition. He’s better at both spontaneity and living in the present moment. I’m learning more about surrendering to circumstances, all of them, including those where I have little influence, those created well beyond my apparent choices.
Almost half of Americans say that moving is the most stressful event in life, and they rate it as anxiety-producing over even divorce and having children. I am a child of several moves and an adult who chose to move to eight cities and towns. I don’t fear relocation, even when I don’t know where we will end up. There’s a part of me that feels like this is a time to take my hands off the handlebars and ride down the big hill, screaming wheeeee! But too, I can understand how much pleasure people take in being rooted, in living close to kin and chosen kin, in having a real relationship with the land, in activists and allies (including the non-human) knitted together, in the essential need for structure in a post-truth world of increasing marginalization and injustice and climate chaos. I believe what I’m asking for is to see all of the world as a place that is home and to expand my capacity for nonduality, which is the notion and the experience that we are (everything is) not two.
I’m a really sensitive human who can’t really be in crowds and is not yet in remission from a rare disease. I know that accommodations will have to be made along the way. Still, I don’t know where this journey leads. What’s becoming the best part of the whole scheme is imagining a creative life lived outside the terms of exchange value.
The people in your corner will never make you feel like you’re “too much”. In fact, they’ll be demanding the recipe for your secret sauce.
~ Chani Nicholas told me this, and by god, it’s a motto for life. If you want some of my secret sauce, here’s how it’s happening for the rest of 2023.
From September to January, while we are on this journey, I’ll be posting this newsletter once a month, rather than twice a month as I have been doing. The thing is, I really need to let go of all of my timelines and ideas for what I’ll do when we’re out there wandering. So, I’m taking a social media break, an email break, a break from anything that pulls me into obligation, distraction, denial. The habits and confusions have to go so I can really see. Those of you who have gone out on a wander, whether at home or afar, you know what I mean. This time is bank for the creative forays ahead.
Paid subscribers will get a lengthier essay, with some insights into destinations and experiences, writing prompts, special invitations to future retreats, and some recipes and rituals from the towns and villages we visit. We don’t have a fixed itinerary, we are flaneurs!
We’re hoping to be in Dublin for the Fringe Festival, swimming on the island of Ikaria, Greece, feasting in Puglia, Italy, hiking the coast in Portugal, writing in France, and immersed in art in London. This is a European adventure on the territory of some ancestors.
Free subscribers, still love you, still piling on with fresh interviews and resourceful links and ideas for wandering.
A few other things --
My friend K inspired me last week in making some brave changes and then sent me the title song on this playlist that I created, which got me thinking about how much music always helps me through a transition. This one is selected for everyone with wanderlust who could use the support to get going. Truth is—lyrics about reinvention can sound a lot like death songs. These ones have their fair share of Southern influence, because my inheritance.
One thing I’ll be dragging around the world with me is my potions for health. If you haven’t heard of Xalish Medicines, an Indigenous business with powerful support for physical, emotional, intellectual, and spiritual health, you want to check out their curated offerings by the wonderful Dr. Jacqui.
My friend Daniel wrote the most exquisite essay. It’s sexually mature and beautifully queer and risky and self-aware, the kind of thing you don’t usually see journals supporting. Daniel Isaiah Elder is a Lambda Literary Emerging LGBTQ Writer and the Navigator for Lidia Yuknavitch's Corporeal Writing.
I’m so damn lucky to meet up with my sisters and a friend on the road. This interview about traveling with your best friend got me excited about the ways we will be building new connections on this trip.
We have a bunch of peaches and almonds in the house, so I’ll be making Sarah Copeland’s Peach Galette as soon as I get back from swimming at the lake.
Happy July friends,
Sonya
You can find Sonya at~
"Whatever isn't given away is lost forever." You and Richard should come visit us in Crestone. Drop me a line if you'll be down this way, and I'll tell you all about it.
Also, that line about having what you need is pure hunter-gatherer. When whatever you need is in the world around you, you don't need to carry much.
I just moved into the first house I’ve lived in since 2006 with a man who I will probably marry. For the first time in my life, at 55 years old, I am setting down roots. After 30+ years of moving from one apartment to another, I’ve arrived at the place I’ve been yearning for. We’re buying furniture and planting gardens and trees. We’re feeding the neighborhood squirrels and birds. We’re collecting orange and black flicker feathers from our backyard wondering if the bird was a meal for some being. We’re writing a book about my partner’s extraordinary life path. We’re setting up home inside and out and I am both marveling at finally getting the opportunity to settle down, to stop and rest for awhile, and the fact that because of a very large inheritance that will be coming in the next 6 months, I will have more financial freedom than I’ve ever had. Despite always wanting a home and a person to settle into, I find myself still wondering what it is I really want for my life. Living with an autoimmune disease that seems to be getting a bit worse over the past few years also has me wondering. I am physically and emotionally exhausted and my spirit wants me to get quiet and listen. And in finding that quiet place, I arrive at the same questions, again and again. What is home? And where can I find it?
As always, I am grateful for your writing and your willingness to go out on a limb in your life and to share that with us. Inspired by you, I’m conjuring up a long dormant writing practice.
Looking forward to reading more soon.
Blessings to you and yours as you launch!