Pace : Yourself
to honor my quickness, to temper my rushing
Hello from British Columbia — Being in Motion goes international. I write to you from Nkwukwma/Pemberton, on the lands of the Lil’wet First Nation. This morning I got to visit the Squamish-Lil’wet cultural center in Whistler and learn about the two nations whose lands I move through on the beautiful Sea to Sky Highway. This road follows ancient routes traveled by both nations for generations; pictographs that used to line the road were severely damaged by the highway’s construction and years of wintertime salt application. Still, these rich cultural heritages remain, and I am grateful to hear the people speak in their mother tongues, to witness the lives they make with the lush forests, the generous rivers.
To orient in this way feels crucial as I seek to slow wayyyyyy down, to calm the part of me that wants so badly to rush the road north. I left Boulder on June 11; in just over a week, I have already driven 1,600 miles. I began writing this dispatch on Whidbey Island in Puget Sound — ironic, that I couldn’t finish this piece about rushing in my lunging eagerness to get across the border.
The truth is I have been feeling much more melancholy than expected, feeling serious and urgent and full of sighs as this journey begins. It feels like my body, mind, and spirit are still catching up with one another, still recalibrating in the wake of zipping across 4 states and the US/Canadian border. In some ways, the urge to rush was propelled by a desire to reach the sea, and the sort of familiarity I feel in Washington. My family moved to Western Washington from Anchorage when I was in kindergarten, and we would make the drive to Utah many summers. More or less knowing where I was headed, it was easy to let the road pass by, to push myself to go just a little further.
I was eager to leave Utah as the dry desert heat swelled into summer. Bittersweet to leave the place I’d wanted so badly to be my forever home, but needing to follow this incessant tug toward the North. And yet my arrival in Washington also felt strange, a quiet sadness in my heart even as I reconnected with dear old friends. I’ve been thinking about little Clarissa, the five-year-old leaving Alaska, the second major move of my short life to a third dynamic landscape. As beautiful as the Pacific Northwest can be, it still doesn’t feel quite like home to me. Utah and Washington both — I could live here, I have lived here, but do I want to? Is this where I want to be?
Home is a big question mark right now — in my 25 years, this is the most unrooted I’ve ever been. Even if I chafed against the sense, I have always felt more or less tied to a place, bound to a physical home and a web of connections. Now, my PO box in Boulder has closed, I don’t have a physical address, and everything I own (more or less) is in my car, traveling with me. This is freeing, yes; this is also unmooring and terrifying and demands I take such tender care of myself. Already I am soothing fears of completely running out of money, of people watching me and thinking I’m strange, of being eaten alive by mosquitos, of crashing my car because I’m staring out the window.
Mid-May, I am trying on rings in the museum gift shop when I slip on a thick silver band that fits like a glove, that won’t leave my thoughts for the next few weeks. Made by Lucion Koinva, a Hopi silversmith, the band features a symbol they call the man in the maze. Jen tells me the symbol is Tohono O’odham in origin, connected to their creator-God I’itoi who lives in a cave at the base of a sacred mountain. I come across this account by Alfretta Antone, who describes the journey of the maze of life as a search for the center-place — “there’s a dream there.” I’m struck by the task to find one’s way to the middle of the maze rather than seek a way out. It’s not lost on me that this ring came to me just after I lost the silver ring I’d been wearing for a year; this band feels distinctly tied to the journey that Life is pulling me into. To seek the center-place, to nestle into the inner sanctum.
I’m the man in the maze, I mutter to myself when I feel weird and uncertain. I felt the edge, the precipice, the almost; was I dropped in or thrown in? This period I've been readying for, yearning toward — to be dropped in, of course, isn’t immediately awesome and empowering and transformative. Turns out growth is sticky-slow and uncomfortable. Turns out I have allergies and unwashed hair. The clarity I am seeking is in a murky series of pools I am waiting to settle; I am trying to be patient. I have just begun.
Before my PO box closes, I recieve a letter of encouragement from my mom, how excited she is for me to return to Alaska. She writes how my eyes were always full of such wonder there, how she wishes she could witness me seeing everything again. On the phone she laughs about how I’ve always been a wanderer, how every time she’d try to get me to come to her quickly and in a straight line, I’d inevitably zig-zag my way across a space, having to look at everything on the way. This makes me smile: this sounds exactly like my plan that is not a plan for this drive north. To stop lots, to wander often, to witness everything I can along the way.
So, I slow myself wayyyyy down. Today I’ll only drive about 75 miles; this coffee shop is my third stop of the day. From here on out, the road is mostly unknowns. 2,081 miles between Anchorage and I (or 3,349 kilometers — shoutout Canada and the metric system). Slowly making my way back to the land of my early childhood, my memories of which are more sense than anything.
Walking the seashore, the sand is steady when I move slowly; the ground goes quicksand the moment I start to rush, sucking and shifting beneath my feet. I am determined to move as the banana slugs do: slow, indulgent, curious. The land shows me slowness; I’m trying to actually listen. I am free to take my time in this. No one can rush me, not even me.
love,
claire
