You never know where the wind will take you, if you let it.
It is very strange and bizarre and surreal to me that I am, for the time being, living in my dad’s apartment in Pittsburgh, that this is where I ended up, simply by trusting life and letting the wind carry me. This time last year, I had just received the mold test results (hard fail) for my “dream house” in a little enclave of Northern New Mexico countryside and, through the haze of mold illness, vowed “never again” and “I will be nomadic until I find the right place to land.” Of course, I never could have predicted the unexpected death of my father or all the other things that happened along the way to bring me here, but here I am. All I know is it has something to do with having faith, trusting your intuition (a process in and of itself), and concerning yourself only with your next step.
The broader view can only be seen in context after time has passed—and the more time, the more context.
I think this is true of life in general but seems an even stronger tenet when you are moving through distinct eras of life by way of migrating from place to place, sometimes with no idea why, just a gravitational pull—vague or strong—in a certain direction, to a certain place, to a certain person, a certain season … and then, in retrospect, you understand why life brought you here. I find this all magical and dumbfounding every time, the intelligence in this grand design.
You have to find and know the balance in life that works for you.
How much time do you need to be stationary? How much time do you need to be around people? How much time alone? How much is too much time on the road, i.e., how long before the mantra “every day new” becomes exhausting? What are your needs? If you don’t know and act on your needs, you might very well (and very quickly) get gobbled up and spit out by life. I have most certainly been crushed in this way.
One year of being nomadic feels like several lives rolled into one and just doesn’t compare to a year of being stationary.
Your life becomes divided into eras marked not by time but by place, because the impact of place on our lives is so huge. Where you are often determines (or at the very least influences) how you spend your day, who you see, how you feel, your mental and physical health, routines and rituals, your memories and attachments (or lack thereof) at play, etc. I can only view the past year of my life in these “eras,” because each was so distinct, I felt as if I were almost a different person within each one: the Montezuma era (lost faith in God); the Southern Arizona era (days of swimming, reading Rick Rubin, and working on my book); back on road time (freedom!); holiday season reunion with friends and family back East (emotionally sweet, if intense; mentally chaotic); the era of being sick with every flu, cold, stomach bug, and Covid this side of the Mississippi; the grieving era (timeless/placeless blur); the split-life era—half Pittsburgh, half Maryland (where I currently am). Each place has brought with it its own set of challenges and delights, its own people, its own excavations and lessons learned. Each one, a different “me.”
The scattered nature of life affects you, but maybe not in the way you’d imagined.
Living nomadically, by its very nature, is a scattered sort of existence. And it gets to me sometimes not because it makes me more scattered but because this lifestyle makes it even more difficult to keep up with all those menial, mundane “business of life” tasks you have to do (adulting). Things as seemingly simple as receiving mail or parking your car create new obstacles to navigate. Throw in doctors appointments in different cities, establishing and/or keeping your state residency (somewhere), wifi and hotspots for remote work, storage units that sometimes double in price month to month, sketchy mail forwarding services, etc., and you quickly realize, America is simply not friendly to nomads. Our systems are not built for them. But when I get frustrated by these sorts of things, I just have to remind myself I am in simply in transition—I am in the process of laying the new groundwork for the foundation of my life, and these things take time and will eventually sort themselves out, even if that means constantly tweaking the formula. I have learned a lot already.
You are more in the flow of life, it seems, but your flow is very much determined by where you are and where you’re going next.
Any time I’m about to leave a place, I find myself moving into automatic crunch time, and there’s a small rush of anxiety that sometimes comes with that—to “use up” the current space to the best of my advantage and prepare for where I’m going next. The days leading up to “moving on” mean less relaxing and settling in and more getting everything in order—wrap up this place, prep for the next. I experience this even when I’m at the same campsite or motel for two nights (one night, not so much). I also seem to always have running lists of things I need or want to do “when I get [wherever].” The first few days in a place feel like a flood of doing all those things … then the settled time … then back into go mode.
You become the only constant when you live a life of variables.
Again, this could be said for any life or lifestyle, but I think it’s especially true when you’re nomadic, for all the reasons I listed above (when things like receiving mail and parking and wifi are suddenly variables, not constants). This fundamental truth has meant an ongoing commitment to the work of finding and maintaining my center of gravity within myself always. You have to keep yourself in check, because if you don’t, life will.
In closing, I leave you with this beautiful song by Michael Kiwanuka.
I don’t know what I’ve been doing exactly, but I can’t figure out where the days are going. It’s like they’re just evaporating. And every time I notice it’s suddenly 10 p.m., 11 p.m., midnight, 1 a.m., I am finding that I just don’t want to go to sleep. I have also been working in my spare time to finish a book project I am very excited about. It’s a collection of essays by metal sculptor Scott Cawood (a dear friend of mine), and this project has been about four years in the making and is nearing completion!
writing
ebooks + zines
astrology readings
postcards
•••
9701 Montgomery N.E. #1057, Albuquerque, NM 87111
★ ★ ★ ★ ★ ★ ★ ★ ★ ★ ★ ★