The continued story of how I decided to live barefoot:
Prefix: The Acorn and Me
Stage 1: Stage 1: Realization

Through the year and a half I was in Texas, a dynamic shift occurred in both my physical self, my group of friends, and my relationship with God. I began the year teaching preschool at a non-denominational church with every intention to get a master’s degree in Elementary Education. The experiences I had that year led to my rebellion. “Rebellion” that is.

As I processed the difference between my home in Bellingham, the mountains and parks, and my new home in Houston, I wrote an entry on April 30, 1999:

“It’s cold enough to cause my arms to have chills. In fact, it’s about the same temperature as Whistler on an August night. I expect to look up from the picnic table to see Bobby boyfully playing with a stick or building the fire by our tent in the woods. The sun is setting but this night it does not fall behind the mountains casting a long shadow on the river. No, this night the sun, much larger than back home although most likely from distortion of mind than of atmosphere, is setting behind oak trees and houses and power lines.”

The church, the people, the path I was on began to choke the desire out of me. I attended bibile studies and spent days volunteering at psych wards and elderly homes. This experience, if done with the right heart, could be invaluable. I stretched my comfort level to help people with needs much different than my own.

But oh, I was so proud of myself for that. I fell in step with the judging, the “doing good works” and pitying others. Feigning imperfection, we’d be self righteous. Claiming to be “for the good of others” we’d thank God for our own authority. I was conflicted, at best, torn between being genuine and fitting in.

I continued to lament about leaving Bellingham.

“I’m sitting on this plain
beneath the only tree
across from a man made lake
There’s nothing to stop the wind
it’s a strong breeze
But the leaves above me don’t shake
The sun is warm enough
to think it’s mid June
In my other home across the way
I can almost smell the salt
wish I hadn’t left so soon
My home beside the bay”

It was a day, and a conversation, nearly a year later, on an airplane heading back to my misty mountains and my Bobby, that I finally cleared the muddled expectations. A lovely man looked right through my story. “We’re best friends,” I explained, “I can’t marry him because the church, and my friends, tell me we have to be equally yoked.” I hadn’t even told him the part where we spoke to each other every day via phone the entire time I was gone when he looked right at me, and said, “Bullshit. You love him.”

Well, yes, but…

“Move back, be with your love. Do not let time or people or space keep you from someone you love. Life is too short to play that game.”

So when we stepped off the plane in Portland, OR, where Bobby flung me up on himself in a huge bear hug, I looked over his shoulder and saw my plane-mate smiling with a knowing grin, a wink, before he walked away.

And he was right.

The six months that followed involved plans to move back. I stopped going to the church having been ostracized for wanting a man who had no faith. I began hanging out with pot smoking sky divers. I tried to convince Bob that he loved me but we were on a rocky path of “best friend vs lovers” not wanting to ruin the friendship we’d built for 13 years together with “emotion” and “love” and “expectations.” So I planned to move back, myself, because it was what I wanted. I was, for the first time, going to do the thing that *I* wanted. Not my parents, not my church, not my friends, not the bible.

I was also realizing my future was in programming and technology. I planned to get a masters degree in Information Technology after teaching at the community college in Galveston and falling in love with the students, the freedom, the academia. And so I pursued a job in Portland doing tech support at a School District.

And I got it.

I was moving home to the North West simply because I wanted to. This made me drunk with Power. It was the first time I’d been in touch with what I wanted enough to pursue it, follow through, and make it happen.

It was the start to the rest of my life, in many many ways.

During a visit to finalize some move details, I pulled in to Barns and Noble and randomly grabbed the book, “Beyond the Sky and the Earth” by Jamie Zeppa. I read the entire book in a weekend. That book, along with “Walden: Life in the Woods” by Thoreau, became my bibles.  I studied, made notes, wrote passages. I memorized the messages: freedom, seeking, nature.

“It wasn’t that my life seemed unreal to me, it just seemed very ... small” -page 4 Beyond the Sky and The Earth

“.. I could walk down to safer ground, or I could throw myself over that edge, into what, what is out there, what is it that I am so afraid of beyond this last safe step where I am now standing? It is only my own life, I realize, that I am afraid of, and at each high point I am given the chance to throw myself over and back into it.” - page 276 Beyond the Sky and The Earth

“When we are unhurried and wise, we perceive that only great and worthy things have any permanent and absolute existence- that petty fears and petty pleasures are but the shadow of reality. Out life is frittered away by detail.” - chapter 2 Walden

These principals became my daily inspiration and I sought to simplify, become who it was I was always seeking on the inside. I rejoiced in going home. Home! I would no longer be sweating in February. I would have my mountains and mist. It was one year and 4 months later from the day I arrived in Houston that I drove all my necessary belonging across the Texas State Border back in a quest for a new life in an old familiar place.

And I was on my way home.

(To be continued)