Westward: Crossing America like a Stitch on a Wound — A Road Trip Up the Rockies
This summer, I set out on a road trip up the Rockies, a seam of this country. Maybe we’ve never so needed to be sewn together. We need physical distancing, but social reconciliation.
The West has always been central to the American imagination—our sense of possibility, freedom, rugged self-actualization cut loose from hierarchies of fortune or bloodline. Its otherworldly colors and crests. Its expansiveness —
The wind-weathered cowboy, his face lined with a map of trails blazed.
The couple of homesteaders who raised a home against the odds, made nowhere somewhere.
Of course, this land was never a nowhere. It was known and named by indigenous custodians who have much to teach about who we are in relation to it. Who we could be. What it could look like to live in harmony with it.
Their names for it are one-word songs.
We’re asking big questions right now about what it means to be American. What it will mean. What it means to be independent and interdependent. In the middle of this tumultuous pause we’re asking what it means to be
of the land.
Of the moment.
Of each other.
To be weighty in bending the arc of history toward justice.
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A mountain is a magnificent healing.
A union.
Two land masses fusing with force and drama and heat.
An uprising.
While Alter Journeys retreats are paused due to covid (extra time to dream up future retreats…), I’m excited to share this journey with you, and what the wilderness reveals.
Heartward….
Xx,
Nicole
Descending into the embrace of sunset over the Sangre de Cristos
Let’s pull over and listen to the silence
