Driving Mz. Dazy

My life is a box full of trinkets, momentos and personal memories. The box has been transported across the Pacific through five time zones, and turned upside down. When I quiet my mind I feel like I am floating adrift, rocking on a vast ocean. I never felt this way when I lived on an isolated lava rock in the vast Pacific. I never experienced "rock fever" for the sixteen years I stayed in Hawaii. But all this land, as far as the eye can see in all directions, makes me edgy. I cry easily. Sleep is fitful, full of troubling dreams. I cannot tell when I'm hungry, sleepy, thirsty.

And, yet, there is great beauty and variety here in the wilds of northeastern Minnesota. And peace that is sweet, if fleeting and elusive. The first couple of months of this journey are a blur, lost to too much change too fast, too many time zones, too many new faces. I am fragile, brittle, easily breakable when I long to be strong and supple. Finally, I fall back on ritual: morning runs along the bike path around Moose Head Lake with the blues in my ears, bike rides, yoga, meditation. It helps some. My beloved husband of nearly 18 years and I fuss and fight. We're not used to spending every moment together. We show stress in diametrically opposite ways. Finally, over months, we are returning to a quieter and more loving space between us. Struggling clumsily down a new road toward pono.

Mz. Dazy reflects my reality. She has been parked for many years. She's old. She sputters, hesitates, stalls, lets in the rain. Parts fail and refuse to work. As we live in her and travel the wilds, her mainframe is failing to maintain. I can relate. Finally, she suffered a bad front drivers' side blowout on the highway with everyone whizzing by at 70mph; it took out the front step and part of the undercarriage. No one was hurt, for which I offered to the cosmos a silent prayer of gratitude. We got her back home and here she will stay, while our journey will continue.