In my recent, although increasingly distant, departure from my home in North Carolina, I was given gifts for the road. Some were heartfelt and given with great intention, others were seemingly random last-minute additions to my paired down life… but each gesture, whether planned or impulsive, felt like the friend or family member was joining me in some way… sending their energy, support, love, or just well wishes along with me. In some archetypal way the gifts also feel like they contain an unforeseen potential…as if, at the right moment when I find myself in need, the clothes hanging bar (thanks bro!) will come to the rescue (it has already become my drying line for wet clothes after cold water plunges). Like the gifts from Galadriel to Frodo and his fellowship (I’m letting my inner-nerd show), I may not yet know when each will come into play, but I feel the spirit behind them. A magical unicorn warrior for the dash, earrings that contain the Blue Ridge mountains, the frame to my #vanlife bed and kitchen, a repasador (the Spanish word for kitchen towel and arguably a necessity for road tripping life), a clothes hanging bar, a sleep mask, and then the post-departure gifts of Kansas City Boulevard beer (welcoming me to the other side of the Mississippi), book recommendations, contact information for friends in mountainous places, quotes texted out of the blue, and of course the gifs of phone calls that allow for reconnection in this time of transition.

The most significant gift by far, however, is not a gift but an item on loan…

My first stop on the journey was Birmingham, to be with family and soak up my mother’s healing energy as she recovers from sepsis (after ovarian cancer, double whammy!) in a skilled nursing facility. I have spent more time in Alabama in the past several months than I have in the past sixteen years combined. It has been an incredible and challenging experience… there was a major role reversal in care-taking for a time, as I watched my mother lose her ability to move her body or think clearly and my father navigate the fear and uncertainty about her ability to live and their future together. Through this time, I was amazed to experience the love that I have always known we all have for each other in a new way, in a way that defies words and is fueled by the very cells of our beings. My father, brother, and sister-in-law and I worked closely together, seeing each other in new ways, admiring each other’s strengths and abilities, beyond grateful for each person’s contribution. It felt like a dance at times of who would think of and initiate the next step, all of this encircled by the expanding rings of family and close friends who joined in at just the right moment or in turn loved each of us with food, comfort, an ear to listen, arms of support.

And then the most amazing process of watching my mother return to us, of feeling it… and of witnessing her movement into a next phase of wisdom and strength. A harrowing initiation, she is on the other side now, an elder, a crone… a wise woman who has seen things and knows. Maybe she was already there, but it took this experience for the rest of us to see it. With her family around her encouraging her to move more, eat more, push herself… she had the patience and self-awareness, even in the fog of infection, to listen to herself. To trust her own pace and timing. At times we worried and let the fear get the best of our interactions, and now, as the worst of it has passed, we can see that her timing was all that it needed to be.

The day before I left the Alabama, my mother told me to go into her closet and open her jewelry drawer, to look through all of it, and find something to take with me…

so that she could be with me.

She told me to take anything, not to consider how nice it may be… to choose for myself.

I did.

What called to me was a ring I have seen her wear often. It speaks to the unknown, to the process of discovery, which we cannot rush, which we must trust.

Her gift is much more than a ring to remind me of her… her gift is her modeling how to listen, truly listen, to herself… when the world is telling her otherwise, when the world says “hurry up and heal”, to listen to the deep inner knowing and trust the unfolding of the journey.

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