The Flight Home

Falling apart is the price of healing.

Life since my divorce in 2019 has been about purging and gathering stuff, leaving and resettling. I’ve emptied three homes in six years, in my home state of California, and in Arizona and Oregon.

In each state, the light was different.

Tucson's light is sharp and unrelenting, a kind of fusion with the dense, dry heat. Many armed Saguaros populate vast stretches of desert. The ocotillo blooms a red of shocking beauty against a sky that vibrates blue. I had never lived anywhere where you could fry an eye on the sidewalk. An entirely green tree, the Palo Verde, grows there.

Summer and fall in Portland are practically perfect. A gentle, warm light flits in and out of tree canopies in pocket parks and outside restaurants and coffee shops. I’m sure I wasn’t the only person who moved there in July when long, gray, wet, and occasional icy winters the property manager may have briefly mentioned, seemed impossible.

Photo by Stormseeker on Unsplash

Winter 2023/24 brought the ice storm that turned the city into a skating rink and shut down virtually all services. I had not been sleeping well for weeks. Insomnia plagued me with an anxiety that frequently dipped into abject terror.

After three black nights of calling the crisis line, a friend drove me to the ER. I spent a week in a psych ward. It was a shock to my identity.

I'd done the work. I’d read The Courage to Change and The Body Keeps the Score and attended decades of therapy, personal growth workshops, spiritual groups, and energy healing sessions. In Portland, unprocessed early trauma and chronic PTSD finally cracked me open. The thawing process continues. Healing happens in a loop rather than along a continuum.

A line floats across my awareness: Let life flow through you. I’m sure I heard or read this somewhere. Or maybe it sounds familiar because it reminds me of Wear life like a loose garment, which has always confounded me. As if the nervous system’s commitment to survival is as easy to remove as a rain slicker.

Flow is this: I feel my nervous system rather than it feeling me. I accept and sometimes welcome the energy patterns and parts of me that have suffered harm, and instead of fight, freeze, or flight, I meet these parts with compassion and care.

The sky holds center for me. The way it caresses the land. And the colors… Once Upon a Cloud. Marin Verde.

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The constants on my three-state loop are a dog and a Higher Power I understand only through the periodic grace of undefinable love. Each day, the baseline fear of dying that accompanies what my therapist in Portland called “Capital T trauma,” relaxes into even more trust in life.

I felt the trust grow coming across Highway 37 on my way back. The smell of saltwater was so familiar. Like the metallic chortle of blackbirds, a sound I associate only with the Salinas Valley where I grew up and some of the trauma took place.

A friend calls this new place my little tree house. It’s a cottage of sorts, tucked into a steep hill among eucalyptus and oak groves above Highway 101. A cup of coffee on the windowsill, I watch the sunrise. The first light peeks through a hole in a long cloud shaped like a side-sleeping human. The hole closes. The light finds a way, though, easily silvering the cloud edge.

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On my first steep walk up to the trailhead, a fit older gentleman treks past me on the street. We wave. Exchange smiles. I see him again on his way down and I still have plenty of the ascent left.

Beyond the trailhead, into open space, San Francisco is a diamond city in the distance. The center stone is the Transamerica Pyramid, next to the phallic monstrosity of Salesforce’s headquarters. I can’t see the Golden Gate Bridge from here, but I’ve heard the toll is up to $10 now.

I stop to rest my legs. It's good tired—my body knows this home.