Get on the plane.

what it's like to wander

Somewhere near Terceira, Azores. Beirut, Lebanon. San Antonio, Texas.

“This is your reminder to get on the f*cking plane,” Jen says to me as she puts a gold airplane on a chain around my neck. It's a welcome gift. I'm polite so I say thanks and don't tell her that I have no problem traveling, leaving, coming to this creativity retreat in Tuscany. I wear the necklace like a medal that warns something like: I'm very good at getting here.

The rub is when it's time to go home. And I have a charm that's feeling heavier on re-entry, on the other side of the trip. Uncertainty lurks just beyond the terminal and it's clear that "get on the plane" is my call to be willing to go home, to integrate the time away – this time a month in Italy on Sabbatical – back to life, relationships, work, and menial tasks like driving and deciding my own bedtime again. Of showing up the ways I learned to in the last month. Of making transitions out of spaces I can now see no longer fit my life. I cannot say that "up in the air" is my comfort zone when it comes to going back. I hate endings and this is the start of many.

I manage to survive the landing this time.

Five months later, I wear the necklace on my flight to Tennessee to a reunion with chosen family from Italy. I want to be here. I'm very good at getting us here, the medal whispers. It's going home I'm not sure I can bear. We will see spring again someday. But not yet. It's March which is gray and for years it is winter, and that's true if there isn't death, diagnosis, displacement, and dangerously scarce daylight that makes us forget the sun. There has been all of this and more.

At the Nashville Farmer's Market, I buy myself a new necklace with sunbeams and moon phases to remind me of seasons and light. Like a welcome gift. I pair the sky bodies with the plane: coming, going, waxing, waning, rising, setting. The gravity of all that can be true all at once. "Get on the plane" this go around means facing this darkness, flying west with the night even at six in the morning.

I shove my little backpack under the seat in front of me and try to drift off and I dream of writing a poem about the nectar of the moon pouring out like a waterfall, another gift given. I wake feeling stiff, but held. That feeling is the souvenir I get to take home with me, I remember. The plane beneath my feet is grounding enough, the one around my neck is a touchstone. I trace the wings.

I let my self survive the landing.

There will be a time I let the clasp off again and go someplace new or old or anywhere. I'll be new or old or anyone. And then I'll get on the f*cking plane and go back home.

This is what it's like to move.
This is what it's like to love.
This is what it's like to wander.
This is what it's like to be free.

My thoughtful and wonderfully creative friend Cathy made this card for me from a photograph I shared with her of my necklaces and this story. Though we parted ways to return home from Nashville, I continue to be seen and held.

Still tracing wings & wandering home,