Life is the proverbial puzzle and we are its multi-sided pieces that connect to, resonate with and disclose aspects of other people in a multitude of ways to their corresponding shapes, places and experiences. 

I have alwasys resided in the facets of life that evoke an inner ache for something … anything … beyond the ordinary. I ache for the strange and unusual schisms and chasms; the cracks and fractured pieces … the shards of glass that rupture and refract the aspects of my self. I ache to break. And the way I piece myself back together again, in ways that challenge the promised prettiness of the picture on the box, is through travel.

But travel doesn’t necessarily involve movement; it often involves staying still and allowing the movement to travel around me and through me. Travel isn’t necessarily going to distant lands; it often involves staying at home and allowing my inner maps to guide me on adventures never before imagined. Entire galaxies can be explored by going nowhere and simply exposing my labyrinthine networks to whatever wants to show up for me. This time, however, has been—and still is—my most epic escapade; an excavation of my inner being so radical that my return will reveal little left of the person I was when I departed.

My journeys are neither comfortable nor easy but they are both fantastical and foundational. Travel forces me to let go of both the known and the knowing as my brain and body map the safe spaces. It forces me to learn how to plot each step, breath and feeling as I walk the physical landscapes of my new territory and navigate strange and wondrous shortcuts through forests, over rivers and around hills. Finding shortcuts, however, isn’t about shortening or quickening the journey; it’s about finding and mapping the thread-like connectors on the external landscapes of life as well as the internal synaptic links of the brain. Because I am never only exploring and witnessing that which I traverse, but also exploring and witnessing myself differently through the eyes of those I see and through the reflections and refractions of the outer on the inner.

In countries where marriage is not questioned, I am often questioned why I am not. It’s a choice that came from choice—to love myself enough to fill the spaces that love asks of me; to create my own connectors and big pictures. Too often I have traded my sovereignty for a taste of the domestic … tethered myself to ‘stable’ men who find happiness in a normality that doesn’t form part of my DNA. And I discover that perhaps the very same thing that unnerves men about me—my inability to settle down—unnerves me too.

This trip is a coming of age after decades of sacrifice. The patched repairs are gradually getting chipped away and repointed to provide new reinforcing in my genetic structure. Tensegrity is not about rigidity and strength as much as it is about fluidity and adaptability. And, since sacrifice means to make sacred, I take this journey across my soul, not as a tourist but as a pilgrim.

I breathe the maps into being … into MY being. I change with change, and change changes me, in reciprocity and collaboration. Everyone seeks change. Few want to change. Travel provides the libido to build strength to maintain and sustain all I have adopted and adtapted to here. I can choose to either consciously create the maps … or the maps will create me.

A fantastical journey can be dramatic and challenging but it is only in following the breadcrumb trail of dot-to-dots back to the beginning that I will reach my destination. It will take a long while to integrate this village into my DNA but it is already an integral part of my being. The picture on the box redraws itself as my puzzle pieces create new connections. This odyssey for the story that completes my picture does not, this time around, constitute a separate part of my journey but is an extension of who I now am.