Undergound

I can still feel in my bones how off course I felt on this date a year ago.

What should have been a season of celebration after my fellowship instead left me feeling untethered. Lost. In fact, that's the exact word I used in those days if you asked how I was doing.

I found myself packing up my things and heading to Texas, where love was waiting to catch me, even in my reluctance to be caught, to be cared for, to be known without armor.

I arrived, put my bags down, and cried.

Soul cried. For days.

I felt like a captain who had lost her way at sea. I'd spent most of my life following maps, rarely drifting beyond the guardrails I'd built inside my own head. My definitions of myself were sturdy and familiar. Then, in what felt like the span of a single season, nearly every one of those definitions dissolved.

I called friends, mentors, and colleagues, hoping someone would point me back home.

Instead, they all seemed to be in on the same conspiracy. Their words were different, but the message never changed:

What if this is the course? What if you're just not the one drawing the map right now?

I hated that answer.

I wanted someone to tell me I was being reckless. To remind me, I had lost myself. To warn me not to trust this softer, quieter place I had stumbled into. I wanted directions. Certainty. I wanted someone, anyone, to hand me the old map.

Because I was supposed to know.

I was supposed to lead.

I was supposed to be all that I needed.

None of those things was ever really true. I'd simply spent much of my life convincing myself they were because it made me feel safe.

Life, thankfully, has a way of interrupting our own mythology.

A year later, I find myself writing this essay in the high desert of Oregon, where this morning I learned how the plants here survive in such unforgiving terrain.

One of the guides pointed to a sculpture suspended from a museum ceiling. At the top, it looked like any other tree, its green leaves reaching toward the light. But beneath the surface was an astonishing root system, shaped by drought. Its roots stretched in unexpected directions, drawing water from wherever they could find it because the nearest source wasn't always enough.

The tree had evolved not to depend on a single source of life, but to trust that life could come from many directions.

Then she shared something even more remarkable.

Its seeds can lie buried deep in the earth for more than two hundred years, waiting.

Not for rain.

For fire.

Only after fire do they awaken.

Fire brings life to this tree.

Water finds its way to it.

If trees can learn to find water in the desert, if seeds can wait hundreds of years for the fire that finally brings them forward, then maybe I was never lost at all.

Perhaps I was growing roots that could reach farther than the life I'd imagined for myself. Maybe the seeds of my identity needed some fire, some friction.

Perhaps what felt like losing my way was simply realizing I no longer needed the old map. A new one is forming with each passing day, drawn with new tools, new co-authors, and new destinations. I'm trying not to worry too much about where it leads and instead trust my roots. They've learned to find what they need wherever they are. So will I.