Notes from the Reno Airport on a Tuesday.
I always carried so much weight on my brain in this airport: the push and pull of desperately trying to figure out where I was supposed to be: professionally, personally, spiritually, physically, familially. It always felt like losing.
I stay in the mountains but I lose precious time with aging family members, I delay my career because there were few options, delay starting a family because it felt too hard.
I leave and give up a blissful mountain life, identity, culture and friends that became family.
I chose three and a half years ago to leave and I never looked back. I thought it would be too hard, too painful to try and carry both homes in my heart. So I plugged into an Ohio life without really looking up. I neglected mountain family relationships. But lately, something in me has started to peek around the corner, pressure testing to see if it time healed my Tahoe wound with a long weekend on the west shore with Paul.
It would be the first time with Paul since 2019: the pre-Penn days. We lived in Tahoe for 6 years before we became parents and going back now just the two of us was so surreal. Instead of being hit with grief and loss, I was greeted with the magical feeling of experiencing these mountains for the first time. Bliss. Weightlessness. Solitude. The quiet comfort of intimately knowing a place. Really, the best of both worlds.
I used to think that there is grief in finally choosing a life that you really plug into versus always waffling. When you live in the waffle, anything is possible because you spend so much time dreaming. Choosing used to mean those dreams come true, but you finally settle down, come down from the clouds, root in reality. There will always be what ifs. But this weekend, I learned that the ‘choice’ is an illusion because actually you are always home.
You are always home.
When you’re always home, you carry the place with you, always arriving, knowing when it’s time to leave and when it’s time to stay. When it’s the right conditions to convene the family members and when it’s time to hike it out in solitude. There is no decision, no big move, no dreaming versus reality. The actual work is alignment within you so you are primed to really listen to your gut. That work makes you infinite.
There is so much freedom in knowing I can live anywhere and still be me. I am Ohio. I am Michigan. I am Tahoe. I am Reno.
My head is spinning round
My heart is in my shoes, yeah
I went and set the Thames on fire, oh
Now I must come back down
She's laughing in her sleeve, boys
I can feel it in my bones
Oh, but anywhere, anywhere I'm gonna lay my head
Oh, I'm gonna call my home