Return of the magical hippie
My inner trickster is the best travel guide
Greetings from New York! Spring is in full bloom over here and the city is balmy, green, and cheerful.
It’s been about a month since I left LA, and I think I am getting the hang of this nomadic life, by which I mean I’m getting better at finding the T-shirt I want to wear without unzipping seven packing cubes.
I’m also just deep enough into this trip to start discarding some of the assumptions I set out with. The first is that getting away from home would be good for my productivity. It is not.
Why would I ever think that it would be easier to write while traveling? True, I do not need to wash my car or organize any closets, but I still need to eat three times a day. I still need to wash my face, clothes, and hair. And unlike when I’m at home in Los Angeles, I need to walk in Central Park, visit museums, and spend time with east coast family and friends I don’t see enough of.
My sister B flew in from Arizona to hang out with me for a few days last week. We walked half the length of Manhattan, saw a Broadway show, and then drove up into the lower Hudson Valley, where we stayed in the most hilarious hotel. It is huge and kind of spooky, a pair of converted mansions with sprawling additional wings that are just made for getting lost in. It literally took us fifteen minutes to find the gym and pool, and even longer to find our way back to our room. Along the way, we stumbled across a conference room that looks like the Macrodata Refinement office in Severance if it was decorated by Laura Ashley.
Anyway, I’m back in the city now, and writing to you today from the Lower East Side, where I am shacked up for the week in a sweet hotel room. In fact, it is the roomiest NYC hotel room I’ve ever stayed in, thanks to a serendipitous upgrade that I did not even ask for. At four hundred square feet, it’s bigger than some New York apartments. I have a sofa, armchair, and a coffee table! Space for yoga! And a desk under a window, with a city view!
I need to get better at blocking out distractions and carving out quiet time with my notebook or laptop, regardless of where I am or who is around. Cultivating that kind of discipline around my writing may be one of my main assignments this year. (Hmm… did I take the drastic step of moving out of my home and taking to the road for an indefinite period just to learn that my home isn’t what was holding me back?)
In my meditation this morning, it came to me that this journey I’m on is a pilgrimage of sorts. I don’t particularly like the term pilgrimage because of its religious connotations, but it feels accurate. A pilgrimage is a journey of devotion and deepening into connection with the divine. Typically, it involves traveling to a holy site or shrine of some kind—people will go halfway around the world to pray over the moldy old toe-bones of a dead saint. But my pilgrimage is a wandering one, and the destinationlessness is the point. If there’s a sacred place I’m moving toward, it is internal.
When I was eighteen years old, I spent six weeks backpacking around New Zealand. It was the apex of my “magical hippie” era, and I moved through the world like a character in the Tom Robbins novels I was devouring. Just for fun, I decided to feel my way around the country, basing all my moves on the energies of love, attraction, and curiosity rather than following a set itinerary.
I hopped on and off trains, stuck my thumb out at passing cars Sissy Hankshaw style, struck up conversations with strangers and wound up crashing on their couches and following them to festivals. In Christchurch’s Cathedral Square I met a barefoot boy with a wide smile and a tangle of blonde chin scruff who took me home with him and squeezed a jug of neon-orange tangelo juice for us. In Auckland I danced at a Michelle Shocked concert with a bunch of baby dykes I’d just met who happened to have a spare ticket for me. From Dunedin to the Bay of Islands, my inner compass pointed me unerringly toward adventure, serendipity, and connection.
I believe I can trust it to do that again.
This morning my higher self said this to me in the pages of my notebook:
Little Dove, you always want to know what’s coming up around the corner, to get all the details well in advance. And then you get overwhelmed with information overload and can’t keep track of it all! Please trust that all will be revealed on a need-to-know basis. Can you just sit back in wonderment and enjoy the ride, knowing that you are being lovingly guided?
Part of me—the left brain planner in me—scoffs at this, thinks it sounds like a childlike and naive way to operate. That’s ok. I’m gently moving that part of me to the passenger seat. The world is a very uncertain place right now, and I sense that I’m going to need strong spiritual orienteering skills to traverse it wisely.
The good news is that navigating by inner compass is a more joyful, less stressful way to travel, and it takes me to magical places that are not in the official guidebook.
When I was on the Pure Wild Self retreat in Costa Rica in January, I dropped into a Big New Insight. In a workshop after an encounter with a jungle waterfall, I wrote this:
This waterfall flows day and night regardless of who is standing under it. Pouring itself over my head, my shoulders, it is telling me to stop trying to catch and hold the water but simply let it flow to me and through me and past me, without any fear of running dry. Today, I brought to the river my grasping, my neediness and greediness, my hoarding—not only of money and stuff, but also attention, approval, and praise—and I let the current carry my miserliness away. Water that is captured will quickly grow foul. There is a constant supply rushing toward me. I can travel with a small cup.
I see now that I can hold my plans for the road ahead in a small cup, too. This feels like trickster energy, like rebellion. It feels like a delicious gift that only I can give to myself.
It feels, ironically, like coming home.
xo
Where’s Maggie?
Now: Ludlow Street, New York City
Next: My friend Laura’s house in Holyoke, Mass. for a couple of nights
Then: London, May 5—21
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Loved reading this so much I missed my stop and ended up in Acton
Loved this one, Maggie. Your ability to honor your right-brained wanderer inspires me to do a little more of the same. xo