Find My Way

March 13/April 2. The sun has come out, plum trees are starting to bloom in Eastsound, I leave for Scotland in exactly 3 weeks, and I am feeling glum. 

Four weeks ago, while slightly increasing my walking so I would be ready for a couple of 22 mile days during my three week walk in Scotland (West Highland Way, Great Glen Way, and Speyside Way), I started to notice discomfort in my left upper foot. I tried to do imagined massage and energy work as I walked, which often clears up small aches and pains almost miraculously. This particular pain came and went, but over the next week it gradually worsened. I noticed it was throwing off my gait and that it was no longer a good idea to rely on my own healing efforts or to ignore it. 

I called out the healers - made appointments with Rick Doty for body work, the Bradbury's for chiropractic care and acupuncture, Dr. Cindy Bullock for podiatry, and I drove to Everett to Althea's footwear (a podiatrist-recommended specialty shoe store for folks with special footwear needs) to see if a change of shoes might help. 

I've gotten lots of great healing attention and excellent advice (though some of it contradictory). At first my foot seemed to be improving, and I was even able to resume walking, though not nearly at the level I needed for training. Then last week my foot seemed to get quite a bit worse, and I have not been able to walk any distance at all since last Friday (March 10).

I am beginning to face the likelihood that my walk will not unfold as I had hoped and expected it would. Instead, I will need to patch together some sort of transportation plan for the 15 to 20 miles each day between my planned overnight accomodations. I will need to find a way to connect with the beauty of the place without the privilege of walking solo through it. I will need to open my heart to the grief and let it pass through me so that I can be open to whatever surprises and gifts lie ahead on this new path. I need to take myself as I am, an injured (former) walker setting out on a trip that was meant to be all about walking.

In my youth I thought the best approach to grief was to jump in and swim. Feel the pain, express the pain, cry, scream, rage. In recent years I have learned from people whose lives brought more grief than one human being can be expected to swim through - grief more like a flood or a tornado, traumatic grief. I learned that for some people learning to build a wall and live on the other side of that wall, to seek beauty and laughter and connection, was another way.  Which way do I need to go now? I think of the great losses of my life. The first loss was of my mother, and included her departure from the family home when I was 8, her failure to protect me from my stepfather's cruelty when I was a teenager, and the biggest loss - the resulting loss of my faith in and love for her and myself. I struggled with the loss of my mother throughout my life, and gradually learned to live with that loss, and even to make beauty  of it, including my  book: The Mother Poems: A Daughter Struggles with a Difficult Love. The second great loss was my inability to have children. This included my inability to conceive a child, and my decision to become a psychotherapist to pass on life in a different way, and my subsequent sense of my fallibility and shortcomings as a therapist (and of course I was asking the impossible of my therapy vocation - to heal the wound of being unable to repair my relationship with my mother or to have a child of my own). It also included my shortcomings as an aunt to my niece, and a sister and support to her mother, and my inability to save either of them from the forces that impinged on her young life, and the choices she made in response to them, that led to her premature death at 27. My attempts to rebuild faith in and love for myself and others were not without fruit, but neither were they wildly successful.

Since I retired as a therapist, walking has been the center of my life. I have found a profound experience (not an idea) of self-worth walking alone through the beauty of the world, felt the beauty around me and the knowledge that I belong to it, experienced trust and love in the simple rhythm of breath and footfall. Now it is time, at least for now and perhaps for this lifetime, to let this precious activity go and discover who I will be, where I will find the faith and love that it is my purpose in life to conjure and live.

When I retired as a psychotherapist, I gave up my license lest I be tempted back into the role. I wanted to discover who I was outside that role and identity. I believe that relinquishing therapy entirely, though at moments I have keenly regretted it, opened me up for the love affair I have had with walking over the past decade, beginning with the Camino (even before I retired), then the Pacific Crest Trail, the Arizona Trail, part of the Oregon Coast Trail, and the wonderful long "hikeathons" I devised so I could simulate here on Orcas  the immersion in nature that backpacking had given me, when my feet no longer could safely bear a backpack. An important part of that love affair has been writing blogs to share the beauty of what I experienced.

I have suspected that the Scotland walk would be my last solo walking adventure. Indeed, I thought such adventures ended with my previous foot issue (fatty pad atrophy, a progressive not curable condition) and the decision not to carry backpacks (to preserve my feet and ability to walk for as much of my life as possible). Then my friend Connie celebrated her retirement by a supported hike in England, with reserved accomodations and luggage transfer, so all she had to do was walk and carry a day pack. I thought I could do that, and go walk in the land of my ancestors and have one more great adventure.

But destiny seems to have different plans for me. I am now returning to this unfinished blog entry on April 2. My foot has improved and relapsed every time I attempt 9 or 10 miles (my planned walks average 15-20). I leave tomorrow on the early ferry for an adventure that is probably going to look very different from my original dream. 

Last Wednesday my friends Darcy and Linda invited me to a blessing ceremony for my journey at a medicine wheel. We stood in the North, South, and West leaving open the East, the direction in which I will travel to Scotland, and shared a deep and healing silence. They read several poems that illuminated the idea of journey and embracing the unknown. I was so moved by their caring so much that they put their precious time and energy into blessing my journey and helping me to feel their blessing in my body. 

The picture is a drawing I did soon after my foot injury to express my feelings - including shame, fear, and grief. I titled the picture Find My Way in honor of a song by Inga Swearingan (a central coast California musician who my sister Judy introduced me to.) the lyrics include:

I’ve got to find my way. 

I’ve got to find my way. 

I want to take what life gives to me

And handle it beautifully. 

Thank you for reading this - and I hope you will visit again and join me for my “walk” on the ground where my ancestors once walked.