Breaking barriers internally so we can become our best selves.
It's March 24, 2020. The exponential math of coronavirus is starting to kick in, and I'm hunkered down in Tbilisi, Georgia. I'm realizing that I never finished writing about my travels, so I open my journal and go back to summer of 2019, in the Baltics. And I find gold. The solitude that everyone is [...]
After seven months on the road, I'd learned that I need a lot of time in nature; as much as I enjoy city life, it creates a plaque-like accumulation of tension that only the silence of water, air and lush earth can diffuse. While I was researching the Baltics I came across a little town [...]
I don't re-read my journal entries often enough. I went through them yesterday in a moment of boredom, and was rewarded with page after page of raw gold: insights surfaced in the moment and then evaporating from my memory, as if they were physically attached to the minutes during which they were written. Thankfully I [...]
Other than my 7:30 am soy latte addiction and omnipresent camera, I've never admitted to being a tourist. I equate it to being "spiritual but not religious:" I can travel without supporting the nearly $9 billion-per-year tourism industry that carries our commercialized way of life like a virus, infecting and ultimately killing the charming uniqueness [...]
My biggest problem is that I look too normal. If you didn’t know me -- heck, even if you do -- my appearance would lead you to a pile of incorrect assumptions: that this tall, slender, blue-eyed blonde has always been popular, probably a cheerleader in high school, successful in career and in love, and [...]
Dateline: Birky, Ukraine I’ve been quiet lately, I know. Since I last wrote, I’ve been to Karde, Estonia; Riga, Latvia; and a little town called Nida on the coast of Lithuania. I spent two weeks immersed in Russian language classes in Kiev, and I’m currently nestled into my DIY writer’s retreat in the countryside of [...]
Transformation! Such an overused word... light enough to be tossed around like a frisbee, yet heavy with the gravity of possible meanings. It suggests the process of turning into something completely different, which sounds pretty scary... and fortunately untrue. A caterpillar transforms into a butterfly, but its essence is still the same. The outer appearance [...]
Another mini-crisis of "what the hell am I doing" hit me during my 48 hours in Lyon, France. To be clear, I’m not questioning whether I should be doing this crazy adventure; I know that that I’m exactly where I’m supposed to be, metaphorically and spiritually speaking. No, it’s the stability-versus-freedom question I wrestled with [...]
“How are you affording all this?” my mom asked me the other day when I shared my upcoming travel plans. It’s a good question, since I haven’t really been working during my midlife crisis. But what most people don’t realize is that it’s far cheaper to live in most countries of the world than in [...]
Midlife crisis is such a cliche. The countdown to my 5oth birthday started at 48 when I quit my job, bought a camper and roamed around the US national parks with my camera. By 49 I was nearly in a panic. Not because I was about to turn 50, but because I still felt like [...]
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