Take a giant step outside your mind. On travel and healing.

“Though you failed at love and lost
And sorrow's turned your heart to frost
I will mend your heart again
Remember the feeling as a child
When you woke up and morning smiled
It's time its time its time you felt like that again…” ~ Taj Mahal

“Travel isn’t always pretty. It isn’t always comfortable. Sometimes it hurts, it even breaks your heart. But that’s okay. The journey changes you; it should change you. It leaves marks on your memory, on your consciousness, on your heart, and on your body. You take something with you. Hopefully, you leave something good behind.” ~ Anthony Bourdain

It has now been 10 months since the loss of my beloved little brother, arguably the ten hardest months of my life. Losing someone in an accident jars the brain - there is something in my thinking that to this day cannot fully accept a loss of someone who was here one moment and gone the next. It has been ten months of a wandering inward journey - from complete shock and trauma, to crying that seemed like it would never end, to days that felt like things were finally settling, then back to disbelief and anger - nothing so different than for anyone else who has suffered a similar loss. These stages and mental calisthenics, the exhaustion and then the hope, seem to be par for the course on the journey toward some sort of integration.

As I reflect on these last months, I become aware how much my healing journey has been supported, or perhaps more aptly stated, guided by my ability to travel. Of course I want to acknowledge that my travel is an aspect of my privilege - I know not everyone has this same opportunity, whether because of finances, time away from work or family, or even the luxury of being received at the destination by a friend, or community, or even culture that can hold us safely. I know that I am lucky to have had this opportunity, and I am deeply grateful for it.

I want to share a bit about how my travel has helped me in this process, how each destination has offered me something different in piecing my fragmented self back together following an event that felt like it completely shattered my sense of self, of trust in the world, of security in my own family system, of the ease we take for granted when in the company of others. I have spent much of the past ten months feeling flat, uninspired, disengaged and even annoyed at what people think are important, interesting, or necessary. Each one of my travel interludes has in some way kicked the can down the road and invited me to feel a greater sense of wholeness.

My first trip after Tim’s death was to Los Angeles to see my oldest best friend. Almost as soon as I arrived at her house, I got really sick. She, being a high powered movie producer, worked up to 16 hours a day, leaving in the morning before I awoke, and arriving home late at night.

That trip, specifically with that illness, allowed me to truly just be. To not feel like I had to do anything at all. I lied in bed most of every day, binge watching “Cheer” and Ricky Gervais’ “Afterlife,” a show I had started before and found unfulfilling, now finding it reflected so much of my own experience. I felt no need to do anything, except for when my friend got home from work. I would get up out of bed and make her a fire in her fireplace, set out a tray of snacks for her to eat, and sit across the room from her, wearing my mask and being able to listen intently to the details of her truly intense day. I could be totally present, I could remember all the players, I could reflect back to her that the pressure she was under was unsustainable, and at the same time, that she could do it. The trip was so healing for me - even in the midst of the awful sickness - that I ended up extending my stay. That trip gave me the opportunity to truly rest, to be very very quiet, and to care of someone else, to take the focus off of my own grief and to be with someone else in their own challenge.

My next trip was in April to visit one of my oldest friends in Costa Rica, the friend who literally made my life in Mexico possible. On that trip, I was feeling great physically, and spent lots and lots of time reading in the hammock or at the beach. I picked up Joan Didion’s “The Year of Magical Thinking” and read it for the second time- the first being when it first came out and I did not have the shared experience of grief and loss that she describes so perfectly. I felt that I had a huge spaciousness for my grief, and would often cry spontaneously, my friend always right there to hug me, to talk to me, or to just be with me. He is not afraid, in fact quite the opposite, to talk about love and loss, of death and dying. We spent many late nights listening to jungle sounds, and talking about the death of his mom, a death process I was present for, and of his own precarious health condition, one in which he lives with a constant, intimate awareness of his own mortality. I also got to cook for him, care for him, and to recall when he first bought the property we were on in Costa Rica, just after his mom died, the ideas we had about creating grief retreats for individuals or families. Again, I had not yet been touched by my own profound losses, of my oldest sister then youngest brother, but I did know from my work that there was a great need for relief, for travel, for contained “vacation,” following the exhaustion and trauma of loss. Sitting in that same place again, in fact the place where I also lost my first pregnancy, seeing the world, my life, myself in a completely new way, I was able to find a sense of letting go, of ease and ability to simply be in my grief, and to start to conceive of ways that I might help others through my own experience.

”The real voyage of discovery consists not in seeking new landscapes, but in having new eyes.” – Marcel Proust

In June I returned to my parents house in New Jersey, my first time back after being there and getting the news about my brother. In the Uber on the way home from the airport, I felt my heart constrict as we drove down familiar streets, recalling how these streets once felt benign, and how they now felt activating. The scenery was the same, but we would never be. Being back with my parents, I had a chance to “normalize” - even though there was nothing normal about it, and more than anything, I had the chance to lie down on the earth, in the same place where all I wanted was to lie down, really to be swallowed by the earth, but where the damp chilly weather made that most uninviting. I experienced the promise that we could be happy again, even if that happiness would always be colored by the deep felt sense of loss of the “bookends” of our family.

At the end of July, I returned to Seattle after more than a year of being away. The weather was gorgeous, I had beautiful houses to stay in and I felt profoundly at home in that city that was the primary formation of my adult self. I was received and held by friends who have known me for forty years, I was reminded of how much I am loved, of the incredible good work I did in Seattle, of how that work still ripples and informs the lives of so many people. I was reminded of who I am, who I was, who I could very much still be, even amidst all of the changes, all of the loss. There was something so stable, so safe in my experience of a city that I know so well, a city that felt like it loves me as much as I love it. I was reminded that I always have a place to go, and in fact, that it is essential that I go there, to touch back into that knowledge of safety, and of being deeply loved and appreciated. I felt much less alone, and could feel myself being put back together.

“It is not necessarily at home that we best encounter our true selves. The furniture insists that we cannot change because it does not; the domestic setting keeps us tethered to the person we are in ordinary life, who may not be who we essentially are.” ~ Alain de Botton

Now, I am in my final travel for the year, spending two weeks at the lake where we spent all of our summers. In this place, I am flooded by memories, deep, bodily memories, of freedom, of connection with family, or the choice to acknowledge what was hard here, but bring forward all that was extraordinary, most especially the feeling of family, the feeling that I get when I recall my mom gathering all seven of us around her to read long books before bed, or watching a tree frog make its way up the window to catch a moth.  The grief comes in waves here too, as I recognize the end of an era - the loss of my brother signaling the end of this family time, this experience we had roaming free, with unstructured days and a sense of timelessness that comes with being a kid, with no TV, no internet, and just this family, this lake, these woods. The lake and the woods are still here, of course, but the golden days of late night singalongs, or diving in the water under the stars with any one of my brothers and sisters is gone. And that’s hard. And it’s also ok. It has to be.

I don’t know where my next travel will be. I know that after my sister died, I took a trip to India and found solace in seeing a completely different world, being held in a completely different way.

I want to offer opportunities for you to travel, to slow down, to soothe your soul, to see the world, and your sense of self, from a new vantage point, one that may also offer you a sense of reorganization, of wholeness, of integration.

I love receiving people. I love putting together experiences that help people to grow, to heal, to rest. Now more than ever, I have the desire and commitment to create experiences where people can get out of their ordinary lives, spaces, mindsets, and find a place of renewal.

“Perhaps travel cannot prevent bigotry, but by demonstrating that all peoples cry, laugh, eat, worry, and die, it can introduce the idea that if we try and understand each other, we may even become friends.” – Maya Angelou

I have several of these opportunities coming up - it is part of my own healing, by getting back to work, by offering up what I have learned, who I have become through these losses and through my own continuing journey of healing, by taking care of others.

I know that these are a luxury and that not everyone can access all - or any of them. I wish there were a way I could make that not be so. But I can offer opportunities for payment plans, and for personalized retreats that perhaps can meet a range of budgets.

Are you ready to travel? My heart, and home, is open to you.