Freedom.
My spirit word for my 27th year.
I meet freedom in Marfa, Texas.
Actually, I meet freedom on my drive to Marfa.
I celebrate my birthday with a solo car ride down stretches of road that tumble me into raw and silent landscapes of plateaus and plains that excite my soul, that feel in my bones like home.
My friend drives ahead, leading the way, so I relax into following, cruising and indulging again and again on LP’s soul-yearning song, “You Want It All.”
And I do want it all.
The manifested move from Kentucky to Texas proves, in startling reality, that if I want to make something happen in my life, then I have the power and the heart-fueled capabilities to make it so.
The birthday pilgrimage to Marfa reinforces this energizing realization. Each mile actively pulls a daydream into the vividly unfolding scenery.
For my birthday, I desire to see the mystery lights. I envision strolling around contemporary art museums in a long black dress from Target that will catch the playful west Texas wind. I want to nestle and write in a coffee shop that serves fresh, thick slices of homemade bread smothered in butter and christened in cinnamon. Out front in a gravel lot, I need to take a photo of a wooden sign that greets wanderers in red lettering: Coffee. Magic. Toast.
You had me at magic.
The magic is an energy existing in the air. A purified quiet that speaks and heightens my senses, my listening. A sudden excitement and innocent wonder shifts into embodied existence.
As I drive toward the magic that is Marfa, I feel the heat of the spring sun already beginning to fume into its notorious summer burn, and the wind whips into my hair, blowing strands across my sunglasses permanently perched on my nose.
I keep my gaze forward. I keep my thoughts forward. I only want to move forward.
Because, I want all of this. I want to experience every quivering ecstatic and heartbreakingly aching moment of my life. And there are still the rolling narratives. My past is present, my brief and heavy beginning in Austin is present, my hurt from men, from former friends, is present, and so is this sun, the cold brew riding shotgun, LP’s fervent, echoing voice calling me to be right here.
Freedom.
I find freedom driving forward into the sunset of a birthday that will clearly break the past from my future, from my future forming here in the now.
Freedom.
Racing along the plains. Running to catch the mystery lights. Rushing into the pause that will be Marfa, to the stillness communicating with spirit, inviting bone-deep ease, and in the stillness there’s the chorus of desires that fear has nervously suppressed.
Acting. Writing. Teaching. Claiming myself as the creative, as a creative determining a course that reflects my definitions of success, abundance, reverent service.
I drive forward into answering the call of the creative. I push into the wind, losing cell reception, for a moment, and journey with visions of what life could be, what could become if I surrender my becoming to light and love opening breath ways to grander freedom.
On that drive, I tattoo freedom into the weaving soul-fabric of my 27th year.
The spirit word surprises. Redirects. Takes the side road. Reveals an internal wilderness ready to be illuminated. I travel an inner road without a playlist so I confront the roadblocks with compassionate attentiveness, wind-brushed clarity, and steady, expansive breaths. The self-sabotaging tendencies, the people-pleasing patterns, the self-constructed limitations arise ready to be seen, ready to be lifted toward sun, sweated out of skin shedding layers and layers of stale misbeliefs.
My fierceness for independence, an inner freedom reminiscent of the west Texas plains, ignites and burns the stories, a destruction to create space.
My wounds, my pain-points no longer control me. I relinquish their twisted power to deceive me into thinking I am separate, unworthy, unlovable. My thoughts do not dictate me. My emotions do not consume me. I witness the currents of being human. I relax into listening to my body, my truth, and practice staying relaxed in conversations, in the company of people, in the turbulence and astonishing beauty of the world.
I do not check out. I check in.
And when I check in, I am freed to be vivaciously present, my energy liberated to serve, and to serve with the intention to heal through compassionate presence, action initiated from mindfulness, not self-righteousness or an impulse to control.
Road trips, wild weekend escapades, revolts under the stars do not define my year of freedom. Meditation, sweating, hot water with lemon, consistently journaling, pausing before I respond, saying no again and again until I find the exhalation cuing the yes are the practices that feel like unbridled wind whipping through the desolate road.
And on this road, I keep reclaiming my power. I gather my power like a bouquet, kindly retrieving power easily given away to my loves, and to the world, and keeping my flowers close. I affirm my own sovereignty over my inner peace. The projections, perceptions, actions of others slip away.
“We are all striving toward consciousness.” Dr. Shefali Tsabary are an aha, clarifying, compassionate words shifting into a mantra that arises to soothe and stop my attempts to analyze or judge the world, actions, behaviors of another.
We are all striving toward consciousness in our own way, and the ways can be wholesome and damaging, self-righteous and riddled with addictions, joyous and community-driven, we are at our seed beings yearning for love and take so many routes to reach, achieve, receive it.
Love leads me to freedom, and freedom gives me to love. Altruistic love lightens and lifts.
Lightness. The medicine I crave after the trauma, a return to embodied joy, to unfiltered feeling of bliss, and freedom to completely feel the ecstasy.
Lightness. The tonic I breathe when I drive to Marfa, and when I sip my cold brew and feel the kiss of sun still on shoulders.
Lightness. I feel lighter now at the end of twenty-seven than I did at the bowing out of twenty-six. And with lightness, I see the roadmap of twenty-seven in all its challenges, and there’s still an ease, a peace beneath the tides.
In the ritual of goodbyes, I reflect on the reiterations of lifetimes coursing through my veins as I bid adieu to this cycle, this circle of twenty-seven.
And twenty-seven tastes like cold brew coffee, feels like sticky sweat and spring water dried by hot sun, smells like the lavender oil I place on the open palms of yoga students, and sounds like the wind rushing along roads.
The stillness I race toward in Marfa, I now feel here in this buzzing café. The road to this peace is now more accessible, a little lighter to travel upon. And I can still play LP as I go, as I journey on to the next iteration, the newest bloom. Lightness and freedom and love to alchemize and ignite the catapulting launch into twenty-eight. I’m listening for the year’s spirit word to rise and guide, and I surrender into staying open for the liberating ride.