gettysburg

If I’ve just met someone and think they might be cool, I like to hit em with a one-two punch. I smile kindly, look them square in the eye, and ask with complete sincerity:

“When’s the last time you pooped your pants?”

You can learn pretty much everything you need to know about a person from how they answer this question. You’d also be surprised at how relieved people are to drop social pretense, stop pretending to be cool, and actually get real and talk about the great, humbling unifier that is poopin’ your pants. Plus, the story is almost always interesting, involving either a) travel, b) drug/alcohol use, c) horrifying gastrointestinal distress, or d) all the above. The shields are down, the person is comfortable, and that’s when I ask the second question:

“What are you afraid of?”

It trips me out knowing that people act differently around different people. Without some uniformity to your actions, how can I tell who you are? Are some of the ways you perform your personality more authentic than others? And if so, how authentic is the version you show me? I can’t stand fake people… and of course I’m terrified that I’m one of them.

Because there are a million different variations of how I perform “Brooke.” In Malawi, I was a lovable goof named Masho; on the Appalachian Trail, I was an artsy nerd named Slim Rims. My family knows me as quiet, frumpy, and a little sullen, but everyone at McMurdo knows me as “that fashionable girl who’s always smiling.” So… which one is it?

I suppose the answer is, “Do I contradict myself? Very well, then I contradict myself. I am large; I contain multitudes.” Socially we are reflections of our environment; biologically, our cells are in a perpetual state of shedding and regeneration. The only immutability is change.

A brook flows through a forest. The water is never the same from one moment to the next; nor the rocks in its path, the earth it carves out. But the current has a direction; it’s predictable enough. So don’t try to define it; simply sit with it, here in the present moment. With the brook as with Brooke; the current and the current.

All that said, the least authentic thing I can think of is the abhorrent dance of “professionalism.” Just a bunch of stilted, arbitrary rules, a judgmental dance. Little kids in neckties, monkeys pretending to be robots, damming the brook, damning the Brooke. Believe it or not, When’s-the-Last-Time-You-Pooped-Your-Pants Girl isn’t super-great at pretending to be professional.

But I was doing my best at Gettysburg. I had my town dress on, writing in my notebook in my best handwriting, deftly using the parlance of international admissions… and the counselor was deflecting me at every turn with responses that could have come right off a website. All buzzwords and fluff and nothing of substance, and amidst it all, there was a moment when I realized what she was actually saying was, “I’m so sorry, but we don’t have enough money for what you’re asking.”

We stopped and looked at each other. We both knew this meeting was going nowhere. But it was 4 p.m. on a Friday, and she wasn’t going to get anything else done for the rest of the day, so she asked me about my tour. We both visibly relaxed, and ended up chit-chatting for a bit while she ran out the clock. I didn’t ask her when she’d last pooped her pants, but for a moment, at least, the kids took off their neckties, the monkeys stopped beeping, and the brook flowed freely.

how to live your dream

1.  Dream. Dream wildly. Think of a dozen different dreams you’d like to live[1].

2. Now pick one. Any one will do.

3. Research what you need to do to accomplish it. (There is always a way.)

4. Tell everyone you know[2] that you’re going to live your dream. That way, if you back out, you’ll look like a total asshole.

5. Take the first step. Now you’re in it.

6. There will be hurdles. Bound over them, over every single one of them, just as high as you can, with the biggest smile on your face, and say, “Thank you! What else would you like me to do?”

7. In time, you will look around and realize you are living your dream.  

This will change your life. If you’re living your dream, then it stands to reason that your life is a dream.  

It’s not a metaphor. Your life is a lucid dream that you are free to shape and explore in any way you like. And once you’ve lived one dream, the others don’t seem as far out of reach. 

So you live another. And another. And sure, not every dream is how you’d envisioned it, and your plans fall apart, but that’s how dreaming works. 

Pretty soon, you can’t imagine why you’d do anything else. Life is short, after all. But life is also long. How many dreams can you stitch into it? Why not make it as many as you can? Wouldn’t it be nice, as you pass from this world to the next, to look back on a patchwork of purpose and passion?

How does that make your inner child feel[3]?

[1] Not sure how to dream? Think about what excites or interests you — juggling, skydiving, love, politics — and try the inner child/deathbed test:

Ask your inner child if they want to do XYZ. If they get excited, do it. Or picture yourself on your deathbed, saying, “I wish I’d done XYZ.” If it rings true, do it.

[2] Here’s where the Dream-Killers are gonna tell you all the reasons why you can’t live your dream. They’ll tell you all the reasons you can’t do it, all the ways you’ll fail, all the horrible things that will happen to you if you try. Listen to them and smile. They don’t know it, but their words are the most powerful dream fuel that exists. 

[3] Mine is so excited that her fingers are dancing.

the greatest day

When I was a kid, my mom used to wake up hours before everyone else, to sketch at the dining room table, this great round slanted hunk of wood with legs that ended in lion paws. We’d find her hunched over the table, drinking coffee (2% milk and Sweet’n’Low), with the red-and-white deer blanket draped over her shoulders, working on some minute detail in a drawing of a house. A brick, a stone in the walkway, a windowpane: The manmade elements were always painstakingly detailed, but the plants were carefree smudges.

And my dad. Boots squeaking in the snow through the frozen darkness of a pre-dawn Vermont winter morn that swallows and dulls the edges of the roaring dragon that is his truck. Harmonicas and construction plans scattered across the dashboard, dry heat spilling from dusty vents, a jug of half-frozen spring water at my feet. Coffee hot off the percolator steaming like a genie from a plastic mug; the crackle of AM radio. My father wedges himself behind the wheel and puts the truck in gear. He lights a Camel cigarette. 

As a kid, I didn’t understand why my parents liked the morning. It felt awful to be awake that early, like drowning in brownie batter. But now I understand. It is a sacred time of day. Pure potential. Anything could happen. Why, it could even be the greatest day of your life.

So I leave the hostel early, and follow my front wheel back down for one last look at Niagara. There’s no sound beyond the whirring of my bike tires and the silver notes of birdsong and the continual rumble of the falls. An occasional car passes, its taillights burning red holes in the dim. I give them a soft smile of recognition, maybe a little wave. This is an exclusive club we’re in, after all. Crepuscular. “Can ya believe how early I gotta get up?”

The falls were no less majestic in the light of the sunrise, with just a few scattered tourists, early birds like me. I stood and drank them in again. “Love Letters to God” was pleasantly stuck in my head.

Love letters to god / I wonder if she reads them / or if the get lost / in the stars / the stars / in the stars

Upriver, there were signs explicitly forbidding people from entering the water. On principle, I walked past them and dipped my feet in. My humble feet, which have touched so much earth and carried me so far. I felt connected to this river, this great mother.

And biked on to Buffalo in peace.

Morning’s sacred stillness lasts until it ends, and the world begins to stir and stretch and wiggle its fingers and toes. Heading west, the sunrise is behind me, so I read it secondhand: the sky gradually lightening to violet to baby blue to pallid white and eventually back again to blue. This is when the cars appear, the cavalry, the people going to work. I don’t smile and wave at these cars. I feel self-conscious around them. I’m a child playing a game, not taking life seriously. They’re irritated that have to go to work, choking on brownie batter, so I stay out of their way. Instead, I share a smile with the new infant day.

“It happens this way,” I think. “Don’t take it personally. They don’t know how special you are. They don’t know that today could be the greatest day of their life.”

*

And the award for worst drivers in America goes to… Buffalo! Congratulations, Buffalo. Do you have a few words? Perhaps you could share the secret to your success?

“What an unexpected honor! Well you know, the secret is that our drivers have an open animosity toward cyclists. Not the outta-my-way rudeness of Baltimore, not the distracted indifference of Bostonians. We simply view bikers as a nuisance, and we use intimidation to drive them out of our city — pun intended!”

The cars were hostile, but the people were kind. I rested on a bench on the side of a river, among the folks with fishing poles sitting on lawn chairs and coolers. Two guys eyed me from a distance. They had tattoos on their faces and piercings in their noses and lips and ears. I returned their gaze, gave a little smile, and they rose and swaggered up to me… and offered me a smallmouth bass.

“Do you want this fish?”

In the early morning, the day is pure potential. But as the sun rises and dries up the dew

and bakes the hills around you, it begins to take form. Often, it’s not the greatest day of your life. You might get lost, drivers might be rude, it might be cold, your ass might hurt. Ain’t that just the worst? It’s bad enough to be in pain without the indignity of it being your ass. Of course, your shoulders also hurt. Your spine is stiff, from your sacrum to your skull.

It’s okay if you have to sit somewhere and sigh or cry or curse. Phone a friend, someone you trust enough to complain. My friend Mr. Tamani always used to say, “A problem shared is half-solved.” But I hope you can remember that every gravel driveway has a few pretty stones.

You might see a nice view, or sunlight illuminating the leaves of a tree overhead (that always gets me, every time). You might have a funny interaction with another person. Some thuggy-looking guys might offer you a smallmouth bass. Your favorite song, a satisfying cup of coffee, a tacky statue of a dinosaur, the feeling of triumph of climbing a hill, the downhill slope, spotting a heron, taking a good picture, yelling out into the nothingness because you can, successfully peeing on the side of the road without being seen. If you look for the good, you’ll find it.

Midday never lasts forever. The sun slides downward, the light deepens to gold, the sky ceases to burn, the shadows lengthen. I like to see the cars coming home from work. I hope the people driving them have something nice to look forward to. Someone they love, or a good meal. Maybe a bike ride? It makes me happy to see the people, finally free.

That night, I camped on a little bluff in a park overlooking Lake Erie. Not the stealthiest spot, but no one bothered me. There were four little kids playing in the water below, and one of them yelled up at me, "You wanna come down and feel the water??" 
"Is it warm?" 
"No, it's COOOOOOOOLD!"

“I’ll pass,” I laughed.

The sky was a muted sapphire, the water was wrinkled silk, the waves were rhythmic as a heartbeat. I scrunched my bare toes in the dirt, allowing a few mosquitos to bite me, because mosquitoes gotta eat too. Did you know it’s only female mosquitoes that bite? They need blood to produce eggs. Thinking about mosquitoes as fellow ladies dealing with their pain-in-the-ass reproductive systems makes me like them a lot better.

So it wasn’t the greatest day of your life.

Or hell, maybe it was.

Because it was a day in your life. And that’s all our life is, is days. And just because one happened to have a little more happiness or a little more screaming curses in it than the others doesn’t make it better or worse. You were alive.

Maybe when you die, you miss the feeling of mosquito bites, and sunburn, and thirst. I bet you remember the hard times fondly, and fonder still the relief that follows. I bet you miss the feeling of air in your lungs.

How lucky we are, to breathe.

These were my thoughts as I gazed at the sunset smooth and pink as the inside of a conch shell until the shadow of night swallowed it up. Stars like Christmas lights, stars like mica, stars like trumpets, stars like swans. There’s nothing to be afraid of here in the dark, as you crawl into your tent. You’re just on the side of the earth that’s turned away from the sun. You’re safe in the world’s great shadow. And it’s time to sleep, because tomorrow is a new day. And as your dreams wrap long fingers around your mind, a tiny star comes to light inside you, burning with the excitement that you’re only one sleep away from the next morning,

and that sacred quiet,

that seed of potential,

that today could just be

the greatest day of your life.

if you follow your dreams, they will lead you where you want to be

The bike trail is a featureless brown ribbon running through the tangle of gaunt springtime trees; it felt like I was following the path of an eraser dragged through a pencil sketch on a paper bag. At this time of year, the land looks at once old and young, like the wrinkled head of a baby bird.

The eraser smudge turns into a clean strip of concrete extending toward the vanishing point across the gray, matted grass of a marsh. Surrounding us, a graphite scribble of forest. All the world the color of a weathered old telephone pole. Beyond the scrim of clouds, the sun calls its warmth across a vast distance.

The path crosses a still silver river that hugs the brown curves of earth and reflects the sky like a mirror. A few reeds stick out of the water like pins in a silk dress. And then it ducks back into the woods, between great mossy rocks and beneath thorny branches adorned with white apple blossoms. 

When I’m cold, I put on a jacket; when I’m hungry, I eat; when I have to pee, an outhouse materializes and I use it. My needs met, I get back on my bike and continue to ride, smiling at the beautiful world around me. 

A dream doesn’t come true when it concludes. It comes true in moments like these, when it takes you without fanfare to the places you never knew about, but that you recognize immediately as where you’ve always wanted to go.  

where's home?

This question is incredibly hard for me to answer. I usually just go with, “I grew up in Vermont.” Some people are content with this. But others look at me like I’m just a silly billy and say, “Okay, but where do you live now?” Ahh jeez, when did this turn into the census? My two answers are:

“Uhh, nowhere really, I travel a lot.” (And then the person thinks I’m dodging the question.)

Or:

“Most recently, [insert location].” (And then the person thinks I’m a liar because the most recent location of late has been a research base in Antarctica.)

Can ya tell it makes me self-conscious? It’s a totally innocuous question; people want to know where they can root you. But what if you’re rootless? In a society where structure gives us meaning, people who exist across boundaries — nomads, drifters, vagabonds — are uncivilized, and maybe not trustworthy.

But what is home anyway? In the West, we use it as shorthand for “the place where you live,” but that’s not exactly accurate. If someone’s asking directions to your house, your home is an address. But take a cross-country road trip, and suddenly your home is a state. Get on a plane and cross an ocean, and home becomes an entire country.

You can feel at home in a lot of places: your parents’ house, your favorite café, your tent on the side of the road in a town you’ve never been. And you can live in a place you don’t consider your home — just ask a refugee, a hostage, a prisoner.

Or a lonely old woman in a nursing home.  

I’m standing on the sidewalk outside your house in Metuchen, New Jersey, and your ghost is floating at my shoulder.

I can’t believe they painted it that hideous yellow, you say.

The red was nicer, I think.

It looks like dog piss, you snap, and I smile. This was your home.

I remember every shelf, every windowsill, every inch of the walls was decorated with treasures. I remember the green shag carpet and the white dots on the ceiling of Uncle Rich’s old room, the smell of marinara bubbling on the stove and the sound of some old movie on the TV. I remember nighttime, the streetlamp through the window, and a room filled with moonlight and the hum of an oscillating fan and the far-off mewling of a siren. The headlights of passing cars cast sliding squares of light along the walls. I didn’t know what to call them, so I called them skeletons. I was a kid from the country, and I’d never seen so many skeletons in my entire life. 

And I remember you, in your slippers and your housecoat and your platinum-blonde hair. You painted watercolor landscapes and threw stuff when you were pissed off and whenever a waitress asked how you were doing, you’d say, “Anyone I can, honey.” 

Dolores Powell: grandmother, artist, force of nature.  

I get why Mom moved you to Raleigh; you couldn’t take care of the house anymore. But you were never the same. It reminded me of the babushkas of Chernobyl. Did you ever hear this story? After the nuclear disaster — which released 400 times the radiation as the bombing of Hiroshima — everyone was relocated. But 1200 people, mostly tough old broads like you, kept coming back. The government couldn’t keep them out, and they figured, well, they’re old, so let em live out the last few years of their lives in peace.

The ones who came back to Chernobyl ended up outliving the ones who didn’t. That’s a beautiful truth, isn’t it? Stubborn old ladies are more powerful than nuclear radiation.   

But you lost that power when you moved to Raleigh. Without your social networks, your connection to your environment, you were a prisoner. You left your home for an apartment, and left that apartment for a room in an old folk’s home, and then you left this world for the next.

I am standing alone on the sidewalk outside a home I can’t enter. I am a ghost.

I think back on all the places I’ve lived. The ramshackle farmhouse I grew up in, the 16 acres that surrounded it. The muddy pond where we swam in the summer, the frozen hills we’d sled down in the winter, the milkweed field we’d tear through in the fall, sending thistledown drifting into the crisp air against a backdrop of flaming foliage. My mom sold that house when I was 19; now it’s a cold haunted place I only visit in the perpetual twilight of my dreams.  

The hunter-green Hennessey Hammock where I slept like a rock when I was hiking the Appalachian Trail. The apartment Jill and I shared in Ithaca that always smelled like lavender from the aromatherapy studio downstairs. My house in Chikweo, the cool concrete floor and the doorway where I would lean and watch the sunset. All these places I’ve lived and loved, all these places I can never return. 

“Where’s home?” people ask me.

Nowhere, man, I think turning away from my grandmother’s old house.

And I drift away, as detached and insignificant as a wisp of milkweed fuzz on the breeze.

eminado

All my Afro-pop fans know what I’m talking about. For you Americans, “eminado” is a beautiful word invented by the Nigerian pop producer Don Jazzy for the super-catchy Tiwa Savage single of the same name. The music video has 25 million views on YouTube — go on, make it 25 million and one.

Anyway, “eminado” means “good-luck charm.” What single word in English do we have to mean good-luck charm? I guess you could just say “charm,” but it has other meanings that muddy the waters; so too with “fetish.” Amulets refer to jewelry. Juju, totem, idol: no no no. Phylactery — whoever heard of a phylactery? The only word that comes close is “talisman,” but it sounds ominous to me (blame it on Stephen King and Peter Straub). I’ll stick with eminado, thanks.

Now, do I actually believe that the black tourmaline created a forcefield of protection? Well, I haven’t read any peer-reviewed studies that prove or disprove the existence of a forcefield of protection created by black tourmaline, if that’s what you’re asking. And I certainly wouldn’t put myself in dangerous situations and think, “Hey, no worries — I’ll let the black tourmaline take the heat on this one.”

But I’d cheer for a marathon runner. Wouldn’t you?

And since there weren’t throngs of people lined up across America to cheer me on, I could make do with eminado.

The mojo bag: an earnest gift, Deb and Peter’s way of saying they believed in what I was doing and wished me a safe journey. The four-leaf clover at the front of my bike, leading the way. The pink bandana, which has accompanied me on every adventure since that road trip with my sister; a constant reminder that I’ve already come a long way. My auspicious turkey feather, giving Lucky wings to fly. And my mission.

On one level, I recognized that doing this bike tour for a cause made me a sympathetic figure — who wouldn’t want to lend a hand to a kind-hearted Returned Peace Corps Volunteer helping a smart poor kid chase his dream? But I also felt my mission protected me on a karmic level. I wasn’t just helping Friday; I was exuding positive energy, and inspiring positivity in others.

I’m not sure kindness is inherent; nor cruelty, for that matter. It’s a choice. In a world where bad things sometimes happen for no reason, how powerful is it that we always have the choice to be kind? And how beautifully simple this truth: the more good things we put out into the world, the more good things there will be in the world to find.

live righteously and love everyone

… was what it said on the tag of my hippie tea. I liked it so much that I got a piece of packing tape and stuck it on Lucky’s frame, so every time I looked down, I’d see that message.

Love everyone.

I want to believe this is possible. If you loved everyone, what would it look like? Would you have to expand your definition of love? What if — gasp! — there’s more than one kind of love, for friends, partners, family, self, humanity as a whole? What’s the root of these different kinds of love?  

To me, it’s acceptance. When you acknowledge and accept someone’s imperfections because those imperfections make them who they are, that’s love. Our flaws are our hardest truths, and they give love a place to grow. And if that’s true, then we should all just accept ourselves and stop trying to be perfect.  

Ha, ha. I say that, but of course I don’t believe it. I mean, I want everyone else to love themselves and be happy, but like… I need to lose at least 10 pounds before I can start working on self-acceptance.

“If you can’t love yourself, how the hell you gonna love somebody else?” as the great sage RuPaul says. Well RuPaul, I’m gonna try.

In yoga, it’s common to set an intention before beginning practice, something to meditate on. What if my intention was to extend love to everyone I met on this trip? To treat all the strangers I meet with acceptance and respect and acknowledgement of the light within them, the light we all share? If I extended love to the people I met, it could only make the world a more loving place. And with love, everything’s possible. Even a poor kid from Malawi going to college in America.

“just shave it all off”

is what I told the barber as she tossed the cape over my shoulders.

There’s a powerful letting go when you watch your hair fall away from your scalp and fall to the ground in big tufts. Your face transforms as the shape of your skull emerges. Who is this stranger? You feel naked, vulnerable, ugly, tough, stripped-down, brave, anonymous, pure.

Of course, if you’re a woman, people start trying to figure out why you’d shave off your pretty hair[1]. They probably assume it’s something to do with sexual or gender identity. Or maybe you’re just crazy!

Fine, let judgmental people put me in their boxes[2]. Meanwhile, I no longer have to worry about helmet hair. And when I got to Seattle, with a halo of new growth emanating from my scalp, I can measure my cross-country bike tour in centimeters as well as miles.

[1] Well, unless it’s pubic, leg, or armpit hair, in which case we’re expected to obliterate it entirely.

[2] Which I’m pretty sure my very first WarmShowers hosts did later that night. They still shared their home with me, and I’m grateful, but I detected a little coolness in the way they explained my hair to their toddler, and they left me a neutral review on WarmShowers. Naturally, I obsessively went over every detail of my behavior — did I eat too much? should I have tried to stay up later? be more entertaining? was it wrong to stay with a host on my first night? — but I wonder if they would have been nicer if I had long hair.

dream

In America, you’re urged to “chase your dreams” and “make your dreams come true.” If you’re doing well, you’re “living the dream.” But also, what did your parents tell you when you woke up from a nightmare? “It’s just a dream. Dreams aren’t real.” So… which is it?

The roots of the word “dream” stretch back to the proto-Germanic draugmas, which means illusion or deception. Chase your deception? Living the illusion?

It’s just a word, you might be thinking. But in anthropology, there’s this idea called the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis. It says that words both reflect and define the scope of reality. My favorite example of this comes from Chichewa, one of the languages of Malawi. Kuchingamira means “to wait excitedly for a guest to arrive.” Isn’t that beautiful? It’s such a common feeling in their culture — ooh, I can’t wait for my guest to hurry up and get here!! — that they had to invent a word for it. Meanwhile, in English, it’s a clunky eight-word phrase.

There’s no Chichewa word for “bored.”

So what does it mean that we Americans conflate dream with desire? I think it subconsciously perpetuates this idea that our dreams are somehow separate from our “real” lives. What’s real is tangible: our cars, our houses, our phones. A dream is just something to talk about doing, not to actually do.

But what if you did? What if you pursued your dreams with the same focus that you’re supposed to reserve for school, career, and relationships?