Walking to South America

I want to walk to South America. I want to step out my door and begin putting one foot in front of the other. I want a new life.

When I first had these thoughts a year ago my marriage was disintegrating, my children were grown and I was teaching English Language Arts in a small midwestern town known for its close proximity to the regional strongholds of the Ku Klux Klan. My husband Steven had given me an ultimatum three years before that it was "alcohol or him", so I quit drinking (drinking is not the problem, it's the symptom."-Moe) and began weekly psychotherapy sessions with a therapist named Mallory. I agonized over grad school, was I "good" enough, was I "smart" enough, would they find out that I was an imposter?

I finished my degree and went on to other forms of discontent. My job sucked. In theory it didn't, but in reality I received and handed out a thousand abuses each day at an alternative high school where students were resistant to learning and faced awesome challenges in life. I tried to integrate anti-racist teaching into my curriculum. I formed relationships with the students and tried to foster self-esteem. I raised academic standards. We confronted drug use and the all the other myriad of problems that our population of students faced. The "Dream, Believe, Achieve" posters of the traditional school system were laughable. I was buried under my job, and I didn't know how to get out. I had become my father.

When Steven left in 2002 the nuclear bomb hit. I dreamed short colorful dreams of atomic bombs detonated in the east, somewhere beyond the city. I looked out the kitchen door at the most psychedelic sunset I have ever seen, and then I was blown quietly off my feet, flying horizontally, slow-motion into my kitchen, my arms stretched out before me in a futile attempt to cover my children who were playing contentedly on the floor. A blast of such magnitude would have certainly vaporized us instantly, had my dream not ended with my fall unfinished, in mid-air. My interpretation was that the atom bomb symbolized the devastation caused by my husband's leaving. But later I realized that the explosion was my anger, and what that anger could do. Years and years of discontent. Years of a pattern of becoming angry, not expressing my anger, and blaming myself for the problem. "There is a problem and it is me and I am defective." -(Mallory, you rock!)

So, I eventually found myself faced with the realization that I have a pattern of "crumbling" (losing myself) joined with the beastly reality that I don't communicate very well. Shit. And this is where I am today, at the crossroads, dreaming of life-altering journeys, pilgrimages, putting one foot before the other and walking to South America.

"He used often to say there was only one Road; that it was like a great river: its springs were at every doorstep, and every path was its tributary. 'It's a dangerous business, Frodo, going out of your door,' he used to say. 'You step into the Road, and if you don't keep your feet, there is no knowing where you might be swept off to." - Tolkien