I fall in love with Texas on a road trip.
The sun-roof opens and spring sun cascades in streams down into my hair, my shoulders, my soon-to-be sun-kissed face.
We drive in a comfortable silence, a familiar quiet cultivated between two friends. The majestic vastness of West Texas casts a spell on both of us -- enchanting our senses ever outward while simultaneously pulling us deeper and deeper into our own internal landscapes of musings, desires, wounds, healings, truths, loves.
“I’m going to move here.”
I break the silence for a truth rippling through my being, ready to be set free.
Texas is in my destiny, and she intuitively understands this, too, and in a few years, when the call to move to Texas reverberates and booms so strongly that not to leap would be a guaranteed death, she drives me again, through Louisiana, into the fray of multiple highways that is Houston and finally to Austin, to establish me in my new home.
And tonight, I drive solo with these memories of road-trips coursing through veins and heartbeats that quicken as I slow my speed to climb further up a steep hill.
I hug closer to the middle of the lane, holding my breath, gripping my hands on the steering wheel, and then I soften the clasp of paled interlaced fingers, and breathe slowly.
I do drive a bit of the way to Austin. I grip the steering wheel so hard on the interstate from Kentucky to Alabama, and through the sudden swallowing maze of Nashville traffic, that I break the skin. Tiny red blotches visible beneath the canvas of palms.
When people ask me how I stay, how I last out this year in Austin, how I didn’t turn right back to Kentucky when the episode occurred and during and after all the traumatic turbulence, I think to the raw skin barely concealing small eruptions of blood.
This move is an answer to a soul-call.
The spirit stirs wildly awake on those West Texas plains, on the silent border charged with hushed stories, and the soul murmurs quietly, at first, and then loudly, persistent and biting, gentle and terrifying.
Terrifying to leave, but far more devastating not to go.
I commit. I break my own heart and leave my family, my golden retriever, my friends, my yoga community. I break and expand.
The challenges, the fears, the real-life nightmares, meet my sheer grit, a resiliency that surprises me. I learn that I do not need to learn to be strong, because I am already strong. The daring lives of ancestors flow through me and inform my instinct.
I live into the hero’s journey, the life-course we are all called to step into and bravely, openheartedly, embrace.
(And I don’t know what yours looks like, only you. And I don’t think the leap is always an actual leap. The leap could be commitment, standing still, a reroute that is subtle but grand in its soul-offerings for learning. Keep showing up. Keep listening, and then, act with your gut as the director, and trust that even in the failing, you are flying.)
I stand secured in my center.
I know who I am.
I knew who I was when I took that wheel to drive to Texas, and I know who I am right here and now on this Friday night drive with the windows rolled down and the cool spring air whipping my hair and filling my lungs. This past year’s obstacles, the tiresome waves of challenges, never swayed me from this truth, and actually, the difficulties deepened my roots in my goldenness.
I am damn proud.
I am proud to be a woman forging her own path. I am proud of the young woman I was a year ago, petrified and calm in a knowing that this is the way.
(I see you, I love you.)
I am grateful to be a woman born and alive right here and right now, educated and with the blazing freedom to dare solo and create a life on my own terms, my own intuitive intelligence, my own creative ambitions.
I am honored, humbled, trembling with responsibility and thundering with wild energy to be given this gift of life, this life I choose, this life I choose how to respond to, this life that tests me so I can continue to shed and release stories, misbeliefs, lies, so I can rise in my unique shine.
This is all a becoming, an effervescent unfolding, a spirited unraveling.
I reach the top of the hill, and there is the glittering city, and there is the out-breath signaling the dissipation of driving tension as I drive onward and toward home.
I still feel the wonder, the awe-struck wonder, the pinch-me-I-live-here delight when the city sends playful winks, like shimmering in urban glory at night.
I’ve lived here a year, and I do not know the city well, but I think the city catalyzed a greater, compassionate, fiercely loving befriending of me.
And for that, Austin, I am wowed in thankfulness, and for this Austin, I say yes to another year, another epic, expansive, evolving journey.