The mornings are surprisingly chilly on the Gulf Coast of Florida in October. I wear pants, boots, a sweatshirt, a flannel jacket, and a hat when I wake up at sunrise—because I am now on the schedule of the sun.
This time of year, the monarchs are migrating through the Emerald Coast. They fly through forests of live oak dangling with Spanish moss, past crystalline green waters, and sand dunes covered in tall sea oats.
Somewhere in the midst of my week camping at Fred Gannon Rocky Bayou State Park, it hit me: The change has taken place. You have changed.
The road medicine was working.
I think of road medicine a sort of detox. At first, the medicine is strong, cuts deep, feels too harsh, leaves you feeling unprepared and vulnerable at best, lost and isolated at worst. It purges from you your past and future and anything tying you down. Once you’re completely emptied, when you’ve released extraneous layers one by one, what you’re left with is the essence of you. Your core. Your heart.
What’s left is you in the present moment, with no associations to past or future informing your decisions but rather the current of life moving through you and you through it, your heart acting as your compass.
The road wipes the slate clean and puts you back into presence, where you belong. It aligns you with the magic of synchronicity and possibility.
When you plan your life with your mind, you are limiting your life (and yourself), because your mind is inherently limited. When you live your life by the heart, you open yourself up to this magic, and the future becomes a widening expanse that continues to unfold in a grand design, one that your mind could not conjure on its own.
This I learned on the road years ago. I remembered it and took that knowledge with me, but I spent too much time away and had forgotten how to embody the teaching.
I’d begun to once again live from the mind.
I planned this time on the road in exactly that fashion: logically, realistically, for a purpose, an end goal in mind. I wanted to hit all of the places I had not spent much time in, so I could write the missing passages of a book I’ve been working on about the road. But these were places I hadn’t spent much time in because I’ve never wanted to. I was never drawn to them.
This didn’t occur to me until I was several weeks into this trip and found myself wondering why nothing about it felt particularly magical—never mind the outright misaligned days, like when my phone and computer both stopped working within hours of each other and I was lost on the back roads of Nebraska and relying on an atlas to get me to an interstate while sick with a sore throat and fever and no mode of communication.
I was just purging, taking my daily doses of road medicine, moving through town after town.
Until I woke up in Florida one morning, and there was nothing left to purge. My vessel was clear again. My mind was clear. All the pieces had pieced themselves together and made sense, and I began to feel the totality of this experience—not just my time on the road this fall but its overarching themes and connection to and continuation of road life in 2019—in a way I hadn’t previously.
I feel like I’m picking up where I left off in 2019, and I wonder how many other people feel that way, like we were frozen in time, in darkness, for three years, life disrupted by a massive fissure, and now we are re-emerging and picking up where we left off.
I also began noticing a strange feeling arise—strange because it’d been so long since I’d felt it: I am enjoying life. And at the same time, there’s so much I’m looking forward to. The future is opening up. It is wide open.
✦ This particular stretch of shoreline is named the Emerald Coast for its sea-green waters. It is so beautiful. In some parts, sections of water are a light, translucent green mixed with areas of deep blue.
✦ The white sand here is actually made of tiny quartz crystals that came from the Appalachian Mountains 20,000 years ago! When the ice caps melted at the end of the ice age, the waters moved the quartz downstream from Appalachia to the ocean to form a new shoreline here in Florida.
✦ If I haven’t emphasized it enough, this area is absolutely gorgeous—and worth a visit if you haven’t been here. I highly recommend the state park I stayed at, Fred Gannon Rocky Bayou State Park (lots of park rangers onsite, clean restrooms, big campsites, quiet, pretty, affordable), although I’d like to try camping at a state park closer to (or on) the beach next time around. Fyi, everything for October was already booked in July when I was looking into campsites in this area.
✦ A few days into camping, I looked around at what I had going on and suddenly felt like a professional hobo. I could teach a course on this ;)
✦ En route to the Emerald Coast, I did a brief tour through the Deep South and saw the abject poverty, the cotton fields, the blight, as it had been described to me for so many years. I camped in Jackson, Mississippi, along a swamp and spotted alligators, so that was an interesting night. I realized, that night in my tent, I’d gone from trying to determine how large an animal was based on the sound of its footsteps in the forest to trying to determine how large an animal was based on how loud its splash was in the water.
✦ We are in eclipse season … how has it been treating you? Part of my eclipse story included a (pretty severe) CIRS flareup a couple weeks back when I woke up in my tent in the rain in Arkansas. It’d been a week of overcast skies and off and on rain through the Midwest, and I felt it affecting my body, but that morning in Arkansas was particularly brutal. I woke up with the spins, vertigo, and my vision so blurred, I could not read road signs and struggled to work at my laptop all day. Imagine editing stories and putting together a weekly magazine when you have double vision :/ The experience really drove home the point that my body rejects damp/humid environments, and fresh, outdoor air is not enough to avoid mold exposure (plus, fall is mold season). I found myself fantasizing about the van. Being in a metal shell, and off the ground, will make a huge difference, and I cannot wait until that is my reality. I am so exhausted from being mold sick so much these past two years.
✦ Can I also just say … after weeks of traveling small, two-lane highways, and years of being in the desert, I jumped on I-10 and went through an underwater tunnel that shoots you out onto a bridge across Mobile Bay, and to see land covered in water for as far as the eye could see was such a surreal moment.
✦ Another feeling I’d forgotten: When you spend weeks living outside, it feels very strange and unnatural to suddenly be inside all day, unaware of the changing light and temperature and what the sky is doing.
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