July 2, 2022
My eyes flicker open to the dark outline of a mountain, and I blink repeatedly, willing the looming shape to disappear, yet simultaneously praying it wouldn’t. This inner disparity makes me feel instantly crazy, for the decision to move was mine. I had driven the real estate search (much to my husband’s delight); I’d scrawled out the list of geographical prerequisites for any potential homesites, and I’d packed the last box with my own two hands just barely over a week ago. Even so, the whole process had felt mechanical, as if something outside of myself had been set into motion, and I, although entirely capable, was somehow too paralyzed to stop it.
I’ve been waging this interior push-pull battle since November of 2021 when Arin and I first decided to move. For the last seven months, half of brain has been desperately trying to convince the whole of me to revise its position. This fearful half has spent hours ranting at my other day-dreamy half to pull its head out of the clouds, to consider all the horrifying “what-ifs”—the bears, the mountain lions, the intermittent lack of cell phone reception. Besides, who did I think I was to tackle life in the woods? I was just a wimpy wannabe, a city-girl admirer of manicured nature, a fake, a phony, a fraud.
Yet despite my fearful-half’s frantic ravings, my calm-half continued touching up paint, patching old holes in our walls, and methodically packing one cardboard box after another.
In hindsight, this journey started the first time I read Thoreau as a junior in high school.
“I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life, and see if I could not learn what it had to teach, and not, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived. I did not wish to live what was not life, living is so dear; nor did I wish to practise resignation, unless it was quite necessary. I wanted to live deep and suck out all the marrow of life…”
His words were instantly tattooed on my heart and became my life motto of sorts, yet they’ve remained dormant as simmering lava, tempered by whichever thin window pane of glass has separated me from the ruggedness of nature I’ve historically preferred to avoid. Like Goldilocks, I’ve lived life in the “just right” zone—neither too hot nor cold nor too hard or squishy soft. I’ve been perfectly satisfied to savor the great outdoors from the comfort of my climate-controlled office, curled up beneath a fuzzy blanket in my spider-free, herringbone, wing-backed chair.
But one morning, Thoreau’s words suddenly grew tired of simmering, and—with much roiling and smoking—started a violent upheaval.
The whole process began in earnest on August 29, 2021, when I found myself bawling over the pages of a Magnolia Home cookbook. There was Joanna Gaines in her full down-home simplicity and beauty, making cookies with her precious children, who were sprawled contently across her farmhouse countertop. On another blissful page, she was walking hand-in-hand to gather apples with her daughters. With every turned page, I cried harder and harder. Each photograph was like a knife in my heart, representing the life I had failed to create, the precious moments I’d lost (or never experienced) with my own five children.
Grayson, our autistic son, had demanded much of my time and energy, leaving me steadily depleted and numb; and while I’ve never resented him, that day, I did resent my reality. I closed the cookbook and shoved it away, unwilling to stomach one more stinking photo of Joanna Gaines and her annoyingly adorable kids. I went to sleep feeling brokenhearted, angry and cheated—as if someone had stolen a part of my life and there was not enough remaining time to salvage the leftover shards.
The following morning, Thoreau’s words thundered in my ears, no longer willing to be largely ignored, “I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately…”
What would it look like to live the second half of life deliberately? I wondered, gazing through a thin windowpane of glass. If the highest good in life is union with God and our fellow man as I believe it to be, how can I live intentionally, in a way that facilitates more moments of potential unity? How can I soak up every precious moment of whatever life I have left on this earth? How can I grow more fully present, fully aware, fully available? And what “things,” for me, are the best conduits to living in such a way?
I pulled out my journal a started listing my heart’s desires: Nature, Time, Freedom, Solitude, Silence, Space, Love…
Seven months later, I awoke on a mountain.
