The heroine's journey
You have to leave, but you can't return
HEPATICAS: The inconspicuous, most familiar hepaticas are among the first woodland harbingers of spring. They vary from lilac to bluish white. The thick, coarse leaves are 3-lobed and last through the winter, although by the spring they are discolored. Leaf and flower stems are very hairy. Hepaticas prefer the rich, leafmold soils of open woods and forest slopes. Two species grow in the East. Early spring. — Buttercup family.
~ FLOWERS by Dr. Herbert Zim and Dr. Alexander Martin
I want to be able to sleep in an open field, to travel West, to walk freely at night.
~ Sylvia Plath
This was the caption of my very first Instagram post way back in 2017. I didn’t know it at the time, but I was at the beginning of a heroine’s journey. Fresh out of college, restless, already feeling confined by the corporate job I landed, suffering from some mysterious chronic health issues. I didn’t know why or where or how, but I knew I needed to go.
I still don’t remember why we chose Colorado, other than it sounded exciting. Looking back, I can see that I acted solely on gut feelings in those years, without fear of consequences. My logical brain gets in the way of my gut nowadays. It can be hard, if not painful, to tap into that space the older I get if I’m not intentional.
I was looking for something I couldn’t name back then. So I went to the mountains to find the answers. I wasn’t ready for the way they met me. For hundreds of miles we drove through flat prairie land, cars packed to the brim with the only belongings we owned, cats howling the whole way.
Hour after hour I wondered when the mountains would arrive. I wasn’t sleeping at night, everything seemed like a mirage on that endless expanse of open land. Even once we crossed the state border, there was nothing but grassland. Then, like deities of the desert, the Flatirons rose from the vast front range in towering peaks of rock and aspens and rushing waters, cracking open my world.
Colorado was bold, infinite and so alive, just as I had hoped. The mountain spirits looked down from their peaks, wildflowers so vibrant and joyous they could break hearts, hot springs bubbling from the depths of the earth.
The people also reflected the land. Most people living in Colorado were not from Colorado. Everyone was there looking for something or running away from something. Like the land with its opposing forces colliding against itself to create the Rockies, the people there were a cataclysm of hopes and fears, dreams and tears.
One dear friend I made from Wisconsin told me, “your problems will follow you wherever you go”. It was a transient place.
There is something about traveling West, following the setting sun, chasing that fading golden hour, always just out of your grasp, that calls to the human spirit.
I knew in my heart though that I wasn’t running from something. I was looking for direction, for purpose. Life just didn’t fit and I had to find out why.
You enter the forest
at the darkest point,
where there is no path.
Where there is a way or path,
it is someone else’s path.
You are not on your own path.
If you follow someone else’s way,
you are not going to realize your potential.
~ Joseph Campbell
It was there in the deep cradle of the mountains’ embrace that I was broken open and told I must devote the rest of my life to this earth; to telling her stories, and the stories of her humans and plants and animals, to uncover the threads that weave us all together.
With this knowledge, I was also given new eyes and a third eye too. When I returned to Michigan years later I could finally see the threads that tied this place together as well. Where Colorado sings to the skies, Michigan’s song is deep in the soil. It is in the thick roots of the old growth white pines whose canopies block out the sun, and the ancient rolling hum of the Great Lakes, the echoes of the last ice age still clinging to the northlands.
It wasn’t until years later that I realized what I had done. The hero’s journey begins at home, goes off into unknown wilds, and ends at home once again. More than the journey itself, its purpose is to shed light on those intangible elements within us already that make us who we are and who we are meant to be.
If this all sounds quite romantic, it’s because it was. It was incredibly difficult to give into the unknown and uproot a life that had been planted in the same place since birth. But it was also exhilarating. It shattered me in a way that left my broken pieces able to fit back together better than they were originally arranged.
They say you can never go home again. You can’t. Even if you return, you will be a different human, forever changed.
There is something about leaving the place that raised you that alters your spirit DNA. The already complex helixes of our minds, emotions and experiences become even more entangled as we are stretched and challenged in this way. You can never go home again.
And so I settled into life here in my corner of the woods back in Michigan. I continued to expand and weave stories and find my little place in the world. Then last year I felt that pull again, that gut feeling that was dormant for so long. There was much more resistance this time. I’m not as fearless as I once was. But I fought through the anxiety and made a few major life changes that I’ve spoken about here. I kept listening.
Throughout all of those changes, there was a deep gut calling that I’ve been ignoring for a few years now. Only with the arrival of baby has it become a necessity. It’s time to leave again. This by far has caused the most resistance, more than making major changes in my business, more than getting pregnant and all of the unknowns that come along with birthing a human.
We live in the woods, but we also live in a swamp. The land around the house is flooded for months out of the year and with it comes swarms of ticks and mosquitoes. We have done everything to try and get some relief, but you can’t change the nature of a swamp without destroying the land itself.
Evan and I have struggled by in the late spring and summer, but with baby here, it is no longer an option. He deserves to be able to play outside year round, and it simply cannot be done here.
With that revelation, I now realize I again am at the beginning of the heroine’s journey. While we plan on staying in Michigan, we aren’t sure where we will land or when, but there are more lessons to be learned and experiences to be had.
Our lives truly are stories in the end. What if we began realizing this as the story is being written? What choices would we make differently if we knew we were the hero or heroine in that story? What would we throw to the wind and plant in the dirt if we remembered stories are meant to make us feel something, learn something?
It’s time to remember that girl who followed her gut like a guiding light. To trust that it knows best. To lead us to the next place we are to belong to. It’s time to come out of the woods.
The journey of the hero is about the courage to seek the depths; the image of creative rebirth; the eternal cycle of change within us; the uncanny discovery that the seeker is the mystery which the seeker seeks to know. The hero journey is a symbol that binds, in the original sense of the word, two distant ideas, the spiritual quest of the ancients with the modern search for identity, “always the one, shape-shifting yet marvelously constant story that we find.”
~ Joseph Campbell
Much love,
Val
P.S. Feel free to share, it’s much appreciated!
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thank you for the reminder that change comes asking for your hand at any given moment in our lives. yes tends to be the best answer.
I love anything Joseph Campbell. Great quotes to relate to this journey. I also really loved the way that you described Colorado. That is the land that raised me, and even though I am not currently called to be there full time, I love the magic of that place with all my heart. Wishing you well on the next place you call home!