“When I have lost myself,
I hear the old season of me rejoice.
How will you live now –
soul fresh,
soul anew? “
– S. Sarkisyan
I went back to Ecuador as an escape. I was running from pain, desperate to find healing anywhere I could. So I jumped around the States then onto Latin America. My thought was ‘this country healed me once, maybe it can do it again.’ My ticket was for a little over 2 weeks. I figured I’d get some relief and then be on to the next thing. But strangely, beautifully, my feet were being led in a way that even I didn’t realize.
I fell in love with people.
I fell back in love with the country that has been so intricately involved in my hearts journey over the last four years.
I found myself again.
Slowly. So slowly. And I fell in love with two people in particular who said, ‘maybe you should change your plane ticket. Maybe you should stay…’
And so I did. Almost 2 months in total. I moved into a house of Americas and let myself feel…a lot. And grieve. And laugh. And laugh until I cried. And I found myself again. So many moments I would hear the soft voice of the Spirit simply say, ‘there she is.’
And there I was. Being mended by love. And beauty. And community. And laughter.
I sat at a coffee shop one foggy afternoon and decided,
‘some people are worth jumping an ocean for. Some people are worth throwing your life into theirs, and moving states and countries and time zones, just to have a season of intimacy with them.’
So I booked another plane ticket.
Back to Ecuador in January until May 2016.
I did not see myself moving back to the country that I have loved so deeply. I didn’t see any of this coming but the older I get, the more wounds and healing I have lived and worked through, the more I realize that when you find people who make you make sense to yourself, who bring life and love and beauty into every detail of your world, you put it all on the line for that. It’s easy to say that relationships really are the most important thing in life, but to live it is risky, and terrifying, and expensive (at times) and quite inconvenient. But at the end of my life, I want to say I put it all on the line, I risked, I ran into loving arms, I spent my savings on people. On relationships. On profoundly deep friendships that heal you and grow you and help you bloom.
I’m in Minneapolis right now in that exact same frame of mind. I don’t have adult plans. I don’t have an impressive schedule for when I’m here or a long to-do list. I don’t have what most people want to hear in terms of what I should be doing, or could be doing. I’m here to invest deeply in the people I love the most. I’m willing to jump on planes last minute to see faces and listen to hearts that make my soul alive. I’m on a pilgrimage of learning to lay down my plans, my reputation, my ‘how it should look’, for the people who have stayed through the darkness, who have taught me what light in the flesh looks like.
We all want to feel like someone loves us enough to jump an ocean or drop the cash for some quality time with our inner most being. I used to just think ‘all my friends are in different places. There’s nothing I can do about that’ And that was it. But I’m dedicated, in this season, to getting to them however I can. Relationship, at the end of the day, are hands down, the most beautiful thing I have ever found.
So here’s to pouring a life out on love. To letting people love you back to life. To letting your feet be led in directions you would have never in a million years imagined.
Here’s to risk.
To hope.
And to be able to dream again with breathtakingly beautiful humans.
