how to live your dream

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  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.

ghost stories

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The first thing I saw when I pulled up to Wayne’s house was Hummer with Trump 2020 bumper sticker. It may surprise you to learn that I, a woman with a shaved head who is riding a bike across the country to try to convince an Ivy League school to give a full scholarship to an African Muslim, disagree with Trump’s politics.

But contrary to popular belief, liberals and conservatives can get along! Thanks to my many years of hitchhiking[1], I’ve developed a strategy for exactly this sort of situation: Be their friend. Friendship starts with common ground, which in our case was alcohol and ghosts.  

“Do you believe in ghosts?” I demanded.

He laughed. “Not really.”

“Wait — no or not really?”

“Well…”

“DID YOU SEE A GHOST?”

“… I’m a logical man. I’m analytical. I need the facts.”

“Dude, of course. Everyone knows ghosts aren’t real.” I paused to take a long sip of the anise wine. “Oh my god, did you really make this?”

“I did!”

“This is the most delicious wine in the universe.”

“You think so?”

I nodded. “Where was I?”

“Logically, we know that ghosts aren’t real.”

Exactly. But there are things in life that we can’t explain.”

“I’ll give you that.”

“So with that being said… dude, my house growing up was totally haunted.”

And then I launched into my favorite ghost story:

Jill and I were young when this happened — as in, not only were our parents still married, we also still had cows[2]. Mom and Dad were off doing barn chores, and we were deep in a game of Crash Test Dummies, which largely consisted of running face-first into the wall. We were gearing up for another round when we heard the unmistakable sound of plates shattering in the kitchen. It sounded like a shelf must have given out. We both looked at each other — we both heard it — and then wordlessly ran to the kitchen. 

Not a dish out of place.  

“That’s a good one!” said Wayne. His cat Lea, half-blind with a single long snaggle tooth, jumped up in his lap.

“So even though we’re both rational adults and we know they’re totally not real… have you ever seen a ghost?” I asked. “Besides this bottle of anise wine, I mean?”

“Wanna open another?”

Do I?!”

After perusing the dozens of bottles in his cellar, I decided on the cherry-rhubarb. And then he told me his tale:

He was in the bathroom at work. It was small, just a urinal and a single stall, so he checked under the partition to make sure he wasn’t interrupting someone taking a dump. Coast clear.

“So I whip out Little Wayne—” (this gets a laugh) “and I start doing my thing, and then I hear a grunting noise in the toilet stall like someone’s taking a shit.”

He figured whoever was in there must have had their feet up... but when he glances through the crack in the partition, the stall is empty.

“DID YOU RUN AWAY??”

“No, but I’m just sorta confused, you know? I wasn’t scared, I was just baffled. And then, while I had soap on my hands, I heard clearly the rustling of a newspaper.”

“WHAT.”

“My mind is going through loops, and it’s overwhelming. So I ran out of the bathroom. And I never went in again. Six months later, I found out that a guy had a heart attack on that toilet and died.”

“WHOA!”

We were up past midnight, and the strong coffee and Puerto Rican pancakes he made for breakfast the next day took only the barest edge off my hangover. But I left his house smiling. A headache is a small price to pay for the knowledge that even in these contentious times, ghosts are more powerful than conflicting political beliefs.  

And everyone knows ghosts aren’t even real!


[1] It’s the safest way to travel in Malawi, and the easiest way to get to town when you’re hiking the Appalachian Trail, and a perfectly acceptable mode of transportation in wild Alaska. 

[2] Our parents split up when I was 9 and Jill was 7. They haven’t spoken in 20 years, and our mom now freely admits she fucking hated farming.

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.

niagara

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After three days and 200 miles without a shower, I raced thunderstorms and a caffeine crash to Niagara Falls and won. The night before, I was a homeless vagrant facing off against a wild animal at 2 a.m. Today, I was just another tourist.

I almost didn’t make it. The bike path was a race outta hell, and I followed blind instinct along the surface streets of Niagara Falls. No time to dawdle and check the map — the hostel check-in closed at 7, and at the rate I was going, I was going to make it there at 6:58.

I careened around a corner and down a quiet, shady side street, and there it was. I leaned my bike against the railing and dashed up the steps and knocked on the door. 6:58 on the dot. The hostel owner greeted me with crossed arms and a scowl. He was one of those guys who would NOT have let me check in at 7:01. The type who looks at the world as if it were trying to impress him, and failing.

But it didn’t matter, because here I was at Niagara Falls. A place I had wanted to visit for… well, all of five hours. Just a funny way to motivate myself to do some miles. Even though I grew up in the Northeast, this was a tourist attraction that had managed to escape me. Turns out to see it, I had to bike all the way from south of the Mason-Dixon line.  

I navigated the circus of tacky attractions and followed a path that deposited me upriver of the falls. The water rushed excitedly like a crowd flowing into a concert venue, pulled by the insistence of gravity, tumbling and crashing into rocks. The air vibrated with the sound of rushing water. The sheer kinetic energy was infectious; I walked fast like I was trying to catch a plane.

Oh, and the sky! One half was covered in a thick, dark cloudbank that ended in a smooth line, and the other half glowed incandescent orange. I walked amidst tourists speaking Hindi, Mandarin, English, Spanish, French, German, beneath this surrealist’s sky. In my excitement, I loved each and every one of them. We were all sharing this enchanted moment, creating it in our overlapping consciousness.

And then I saw it—

the precipitous drop.

Precipitous is really the only word to describe it. 635,000 gallons per second spilling down a chasm the height of the Arc de Triomphe. Did people really go over this in barrels? I loved them too. There in the air suffused with saffron, I loved the falls and everyone around me and the power and majesty of this moment. The flashing neon lights, the tacky tourist traps — they were endearing in their insignificance compared to this, the very presence of god.

Like a mosquito biting the Buddha.

How very human, I thought. How charmingly, quixotically human. Making money on the banks of creation. Imagine how this place must have looked before. “WE WERE HERE TOO!” those neon lights screamed. I pitied them, for missing the point, but I forgave them too.

 My ego consumed in the crashing power of water.

the serial killer

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Beneath the wan remnants of a pancake-batter sunset, in a patch of woods behind a little league field in Greece Canal Park, our intrepid heroine pushes her bike along a muddy trail and through a miasma of mosquitoes. She has long since given up the dream of an Instagram campsite; like a lonely barfly at last call, she’ll take what she can get. Is that a reasonably flat spot? Hey there good-lookin’, wanna have a sleepover?

I lean my bike against a tree, do a backbend, and turn off my Strava. Time to kick back and relax. And by that I mean… laboriously construct my shelter for the evening!

After laying the ground cloth, staking the tent, feeding the poles through the guides, strapping on the rainfly, locking up my bike, inflating my sleeping pad, laying out my sleeping bag, brushing my teeth, changing out of my bike shorts, and killing all the mosquitoes[1] that had gotten into my tent, I finally lay down… and there’s a rock digging into my spine.

But it’s dark, and I don’t feel like undoing all my hard work and shifting it two inches to the left only to find a root poking me in the kidney and 20 more mosquitoes in my tent. This, I decide, is an opportunity to practice acceptance[2].

I watch an episode of “Breaking Bad” on my phone — because there’s nothing like watching an hour of gratuitous violence[3], alone and in a strange place at night, to help a gal unwind after a 60-mile bike ride. With visions of drug crimes dancing through my head (and a pointy rock dancing between my thoracic vertebrae) I fall into a restless sleep…

…and wake up at 2 a.m. to the sound of a dentist’s drill outside my tent.

Eyes pop open. Silence. What was that noise? Maybe it was just a— 

Rhnnnnnnnnn! 

Nope, I’m definitely not dreaming, and that was definitely closer than before. I turn on my flashlight, and the serial killer bounds crashingly through the underbrush. 

I lay there, barely breathing, frozen and alert, adrenaline coursing through my veins.

Fiddlehead pipes up: what if there’s someone crazy outside my tent who wants to hurt me?

There isn’t, Maple says firmly. I’m sure it’s just an animal, and I don’t think there are bears around here, so we’re good.

And then a third, unfamiliar voice: If you had let a guy come with you on this trip, he could be handling this right now.

RHNNNNNNNN! 

Ahh fuck.

I get out of my tent, wave my flashlight around, and yell, “I MEAN YOU NO HARM. JUST LET ME SLEEP!' I bend down and grope around until I find a big stick, and then spear it into the muddy ground outside my tent. To use as a weapon, I guess?

RNNNNNNNNN! 

Okay, now this is just getting annoying. “GO AWAY!” I yell, and then under my breath: “God, take a hint!”

Silence. I think we’re okay. I crawl back into my tent, now filled with mosquitoes, and text my dad and a friend. I try to relax, but my brain is caught in a tug-of-war between Sleep and Fear. Every time it looks like Sleep is going to win, Fear jerks the rope, and my eyes pop open.

The next morning, I emerge from my tent smeared with mud, dead mosquitoes, and my own blood, and a text from my dad explaining that, “raccoons make all kinds of noises.”

[1] I normally try not to kill bugs, but these guys had it coming.

[2] In other words, I say “fuck it.”

[3] For those who’ve seen the show, it was “Negro y Azul,” with Danny Trejo and the tortoise.

“the computer dog”

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read the cardboard lawn sign, and I laughed. What a weird concept for a small business! Like… maybe this guy has a dog, and it’s the mascot for his computer-fixing side hustle? Then I got a little closer and realized it actually said, “The Computer Doc.” 

How funny, I thought. You switch one letter, and the entire meaning changes.

You might think that on a long solo pilgrimage, you experience profound thoughts about, like, god or human nature or something. Sometimes that’s true. But other times, you conduct a comprehensive exploration of all the alphabetic permutations of the phrase “The Computer Dog.”

Highlights:

  • the computer fog (it’s a virus)

  • the computer hog (he just keeps all the computers that come in)

  • the computer hug (for when your computer’s feeling down)

  • the computer dom (for when your computer’s feeling horny)

  • the computer dot (uh, I believe the term is “pixel”)

Computer dox, that’s malaria medicine for your computer. Computer doy, a holdover from the ’90s, like, computer doy, you don’t know what’s wrong with your computer? Computer doz… puts your computer right to sleep.

Then I glanced up and thought, Hey, a lake!

*

Freedom is skipping stones on a beach while everyone else is at work.

*

I leaned under a birch tree in someone’s front yard. I had no home, so the world was my home. And in that moment, my home was rolling farmland and beech forests, the glittering surface of Owasco Lake, and a cascade of spade-shaped leaves overhead, serrate edges rimmed in golden sunlight.

If gold is valuable because it’s rare, than what about this?

what it’s like to ride in a car with me

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“Rob, I get to choose the music.”

“Okay.” Rob has learned to be agreeable when I demand control of the stereo[1].

“It’s Nahko and Medicine for the People. You have to love them.”

“I love them!”

“No sass!” I yell. “Hey, I have a present for you.” I hand him the bracelet I found outside Kim’s Kitchen.

“‘Liberty or Death’?”

“Because your kyiiiiiin is from New Hampshire. Hey Rob, say kin.”

“Kin.”

“No, say it like this: kyiiiiiiiin.”

Kyiiiiiiiiiin.”

I cackle. “My kyiiiiiin is from New Hampshire too. Live free or die!”

“Live free or die!” 

“HEY ROB wanna play a game I just made up?

“Sure.” Rob has learned to be agreeable when I propose games[2].

“It’s called ROBROBROBROBROB. Here’s how you play, are you ready?”

“Yes.”

“ROBROBROBROBROBROBROBROB! Now it’s your turn!”

“BROOKEBROO—”

“NO!”

“What?!”

“You’re doing it wrong! It’s called ROBROBROBROBROB not BROOKEBROOKEBROOKEBROOKE! Now do it again!”

“ROBROBROBROBROBROBROBROBROB!!”

“I see you’ve played ROBROBROBROBROB before! Hey Rob!”

“Yes?”

“Wanna play a game I just made up?”

“Is it BROOKEBROOKEBROOKEBROOKE?”

“HOW DID YOU KNOW?!”

“BROOKEBROOKEBROOKEBROOKE!”
I screamed and yelled, “ROB LOOK!”  

Time slowed and our jaws dropped as we slid past a sign that said, I shit you not, Brook Road.

“ROB YOU MANIFESTED IT!”

And that, dear friends, is how Rob Campbell became the world champion of BROOKEBROOKEBROOKEBROOKE.


[1] Even though he has literally the best taste in music in the world.

[2] Even though they inevitably have no rules, no winners, and no point.

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?

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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

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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.