#5. Roots Enough

It’s astonishing how a place can get in your blood and put down its roots all the way into your bones. Stretching to your soul and carving out a longing so deep and cavernous, a wide yawning place within that begs to be filled in a way no lover can.

When you find your true home, the land itself will weave its way about you and in you and eventually pull you back into its embrace.

I have had more than one such lover. Los Olivos, Maui, a tiny town along the western coast of Spain, Florence.

The one who has returned to me over and over again is southern Tuscany and the place where it and Umbria meet.

I know to the dollar exactly how much I will need in order to get a long stay visa. My spreadsheet marks the debts I have left to pay alongside my projected cost of living there. I know how much I will have to save in order to one day buy an old farmhouse and some land with an olive grove, vines, and a garden.

I write it in journals and on whiteboards and here digitally and upon the flesh of my heart. All the while my body is calling out to return, return.

When we find a thing or person or place that affects us that much, we sometimes say we would sacrifice anything to be with them/it. I have learned the hard way that it’s just as important to know what you won’t do in service to that dream as much as what you will do.

I have also learned the hard way that my peace, my joy, my mental, physical, spiritual, energetic health can never lay on that altar. But what I can put there is my ego, expectations of how things will unfold, and tightly held control.

If you don’t know what this place is for yourself, I suggest you start with how you want to feel in your mind, body, and spirit.

Maybe that’s peaceful or joyful or beautiful, maybe it’s feeling free. Make a list. It can be as long or short as you want. It just has to hold the essence of what you want your life to feel like every day.

Close your eyes. Imagine it. Think about how that feels in your body and give yourself permission to create a life that feels that way.

Then you have to get into some practical pieces...

What kind of people do you want in your life? What would it look like to surround yourself with folks on their own journeys of self discovery?

What do you need, like really need to make you feel the way you’ve decided you want to feel? Maybe it’s community or solitude or art.

What routines do you want to be a part of your everyday?

This last one can be difficult because sometimes it’s covered over with a layer of exhaustion so thick all we can think is “I want to do nothing. Sleep for at least 100 years and skip this next part.”

I get it. The past few years, decade, this lifetime have been…I believe the scientific term is…super fucked. But if you can, poke around a bit to see what you can find beneath the exhaustion, depression, overwhelm, grief.

For some folks answering these questions takes one session of self exploration. For others (like me), it may take an entire decade to get to those answers.

The treasure is worth the dig.

And it will be muddy, baby. You will have to wade on in and excavate all the things you think you are supposed to want and all the things you say you want. You will strip away layer after layer of masks and beliefs that no longer serve you and what’s hidden there beneath it all will more than likely shock the hell out of you.

For me that life is a much more simplified one than I ever thought I would live. It’s a quiet one away from spotlights and crowds. It is the peace the wind carries while turning the rippling of leaves into a percussion instrument. The way it feels to live a waking for the sunrise, watch it set every evening type of life. Beauty beneath my fingers as art and words and thoughts pour out from my soul.

It’s accepting your limitations and instead of enduring them, prioritize them. You turn them into parameters and boundaries that serve to shape the kind of life your body, mind, and spirit need.

And that shape will change. If you give yourself what you need, your desires have an opportunity to evolve into other things you could not foresee.

Let them.

You will only experience this lifetime once. In the oft quoted words of our beloved Mary Oliver, “what is it you plan to do with your one wild and precious life?”

My wild life has already begun and soon enough (though I can’t currently see how) I plan to dig my hands in the Tuscan soil and grow things. To break nails pruning the olives and vines. To keep learning about growing seasons and olive mites. To cut flowers from my garden, pour oil from my trees, taste all the good things I have seeded and cultivated myself.

To walk down my cypress lined drive offering gratitude each morning. To scrape away paint and make the walls a color that feels true. To put stars on the ceiling made of gold leaf and joy. To replace the ugly ass tile in the bathroom and put in a clawfoot tub. And scrub the windows until all the beauty that lies below can be seen.

To put down roots enough to plant strawberries and know I will be there to harvest them.

Then I plan to sit in one of the outdoor rocking chairs and watch the sun set while I talk to you. We will sip something warm or in the summer we will scandalize our european neighbors by putting ice in our drinks. Maybe we'll hold hands or hold space or just let the silence sit gently between us.

Sometimes it will just be me there. And that’s beautiful too.