Letting the Land be Your Guide

The Ligurian seaside, Italy

Since September, 2021 I’ve been traveling from home to home and place to place with a small suitcase, a backpack and a guitar. 

These six months have been an amalgamation of beauty, awe, curiosity and loneliness. 

I’ve felt both lost and found, not uncommonly at the same time.

Something keeps me here on this side of the world. A whisper to stay.

In early March I left Italy. I’d reached my legal limit of staying on a US passport in the Schengen Zone of Europe (90 days within a 6 month period of time). There were tears and hugs as I said “See you soon” to my amazing host family. My time as an au pair was really wonderful. 

I was lucky enough to have had a host family who made me feel like a part of their unit from the moment I arrived, greeting me at the train station, little one in their arms. A little one and a family I came to absolutely love and adore.

To be immersed into a new culture and language is an experience I think everyone should have at some point, if they can. The opportunity to have your perspectives altered. To adopt a flexibility to live and eat differently for awhile. 

It catapults us out of our own little worlds. A mind-and-heart-expanding, humbling kind of discomfort. Especially as an American, I believe this is vital. We can be quite entitled as Westerners to think other people and cultures should meet us where we are.

Most mornings in Italy I would take a leisurely walk by the sea. I started these walks with a visit to the local bakery to pick up a brioche con marmellata di albicocche (Italian brioche is what we would typically think of as a croissant. Con marmellata di albicocche means “with apricot marmalade.”). It’s my favorite Italian breakfast. I think I had it almost every single day. So anyway, I would pick up my brioche, chat a bit with my new friend, Vale, who works at the bakery, and then walk along the beach. I wouldn’t eat the brioche until I got back to my little apartment so I could have my coffee, made in a Moka pot. I loved this ritual.

Some mornings I would sit and meditate next to the waves, either on a jutting stretch of giant rocks or a rogue log on the beach.  

It was during these walks and meditations by the Ligurian Sea that I came to an understanding, a revelation if you will….

Whenever I strive to define or figure out the “why” behind the journey or get wrapped up in my own grand ideas and intentions, I forget to let the place actually speak its intentions to me. By trying so hard to manipulate my time or energy in a place, I inhibit my own presence in the place itself.

The sea told me to be like the waves and let myself be guided by an energy greater than myself. Greater than my own ideas and visions. To travel with fluidity.

The Ligurian Sea became my teacher. I came to Her to ask for guidance.

Please show me what you’d like me to do and learn here.
Please guide me to the people you’d like me to meet and the experiences you’d like me to have. 

Each day I would release hold of my grip a little more and a little more. 

Cervo, Italy

It’s easy to be a bit self-centered when we travel. It can become all about the experiences we want to have or we think we “should” have. An entitlement to a land and a culture that isn’t ours. 

What if, instead, we landed somewhere and started a dialogue with the land?

An acknowledgement that we’re standing on land that has had millions footprints before ours.

Ocean waters that have touched zillions of grains of sand.

Land that has been cultivated by centuries of people and animals.

There is an energy to every land we walk upon.

Yet we’re so busy with our own grand plans, we can completely forget to look down, look up and look out.

And most importantly, to listen.

Blackford Hill, Edinburgh, Scotland

What I now know for sure is that a place will tell me almost immediately if it wants me there.

It becomes very obvious, very quickly.

I can feel in my body now when a land is inviting me to stay and when it’s asking me to go.

I can also feel when a land is calling me to it.

Back in 2014, before I was even consciously aware of this way of living and traveling, New York City called to me. So I went. That magnificent city kept me there for five years. In moments when I thought… “is it time to go?” New York would suddenly present me with the next job or place to live. Then after five years, I felt the call to leave. I didn’t understand why, I just knew I had to listen. I also knew it wasn’t a goodbye… it was an “I’ll be seeing you.”

“Okay, New York, I’m listening. I hear you. I love you.”

Italy called to me next. I didn’t know why. It had been calling to me since I could remember, honestly. I arrived and that land swooped me from town to village to city in such a flowing way. I immediately felt a deep reverence for the land, the sea, the food and the people.

At the end of last year, I arrived in London and had a dramatically different experience. There was something I couldn’t identify. Something wasn’t clicking. It wasn’t my time to be there. Rather than struggling to make it work and force myself upon that land, I decided to leave.

Edinburgh called to me. This city and its people have so easefully and graciously taken me in for the past month and a half. I continue to listen and talk to the land here, making sure I’m not outstaying my welcome.

I have even been starting a dialogue that feels a bit new to me. An opening of a new portal of communication to my ancestors who came from these lands.

Stockbridge, Edinburgh, Scotland

This way of being in the world has helped me to soften and release some of my desire to control outcomes.

To do more listening and less defining.

A deep sense of gratitude and respect for this Earth we have the privilege of traversing.