Our Journeys through this life are the Teachers…
A Spiritual Journey always sort of creeps up on one. It’s never clear that this is what’s happening until one is totally engulfed in the lessons, the learning, the stories, the growth, I’ve never known one to be painless or without some level of challenge to ones character.
I knew I had to go. I knew my kids were experiencing their own growing pains, those pains that one has to try oneself out, see what one is made of, see who one is needing to be as they move through life. most of all the need is to prove oneself to oneself, to show that one can do it, can be resilient, can do the right things.
It was no different for myself, the only difference was that I can’t even name or number how many times I’ve found myself at this point in my life. It seems it often started with a deeply painful and life-changing event, that necessitates a movement of some sort, which leads to shifts and more movements.
Back in the fall, I realized that I needed to leave the state I’d been born in and lived in all of my 67 years. I, like my Mother and Grandmother before me were drawn to the Southwest. They chose Phoenix, I Albuquerque. I knew that the cold of Colorado had bitten into my being for the last time. That bite, and the actions of a member of my household who decided to also take tiny bites out of me were draining me of my life force and actual will to live. Prior to that, a breakup from a man who also had taken big chunks out of my spirit was wearing and weathering me in ways that my spirit knew were no longer sustainable.
There I was, feeling like Swiss cheese and holding a dawning awareness that to stay would be the death to my spirit, if not my body as well. So, I prepared myself for leaving. At first I wasn’t sure where I was going to land. Phoenix felt too daunting for me given the intense heat and need to live in air conditioning for a good part of the year. Having asthma, I’m sensitive to AC for some reason, even indoor heat in Winter is drying, but I have learned to work with it.
I looked at prices, various towns and cities–too expensive, too remote, too lacking in something I needed, and I knew in my spirit somewhere what that was, but not on a conscious level right away. I was drawn to Santa Fe and Taos, yet they both have wintery weather, and they are sadly almost as expensive as Colorado.
I have a dear friend in Albuquerque, so started looking seriously. I didn’t know that it seemed to hold what I was looking for until I got here. So I began to plan…
To be continued…