Where Potential, Place and Possibility Collide
COLLISION 00018: Chicago, USA
Since returning home from South Africa, I have tried to trace back the roots of a mysterious feeling that’s all but overcome me. I am restless, unsettled and uncharacteristically impatient, even for me. I haven’t slid back seamlessly into my habits and routines. I have resisted them. I’m bored and distracted, out of rhythm and off-balance.
Home doesn’t feel like home right now.
I don’t have to fixate or linger long to identify the cause. I do have to decide what to do with it and that’s a far more challenging thing to confront.
Going back to my first trip of the year, I realized something far more transformational than I was comfortable acknowledging shifted inside of me when I stayed at that Airbnb on Waiheke Island in New Zealand.
It may have even started to take shape on the ferry ride from Auckland. My flashbacks that day are saturated with the color of the water, softened by the stillness of it and reactivated, even now just thinking about the cool, crisp breeze spinning off of it.
At first contact with Waiheke, I was mesmerized by something, a force, a feeling, the winds of change. I’ve talked about it before, a connection we feel to place that cannot be fully understood or described. Only deeply felt.
When my taxi collected me from my first-stop tasting and lunch at Man O’War Winery to drive me to my Airbnb, I was captivated once more by the expansiveness of the land and sea around me. Waiheke Island was so much bigger than I had pictured it, so much more spread out and yet also comfortingly contained.
It felt like a place I could think and let go.
I was reminded of Waiheke and that first-impression drive again, traveling through Hemel-en-Aarde wine region in South Africa last month. The hills, the vineyards tucked amongst and on them just so. The sky. The color of the ocean as we made our way from a tasting and lunch to my Airbnb.
A familiar journey full of familiar feelings.
The same sense of peace and calm I had experienced those days on New Zealand’s wine island overtook me here too. As far as my soul was concerned, these places, worlds and miles apart were sister cities. They enabled reflection and inspired a brash, provocative notion of movement and progress. They were inertia snappers.
It was as if a challenge had been issued, asking me for the first time to really contemplate if I was living in the right place for my mind, body, gut and soul to align. Since alignment was what I had been seeking, these places asked me if I was truly enabling through place the one thing I wanted to do more than anything else. Create. More exactly, create through encounter and taste.
While that question first presented itself in New Zealand, as a collision between potential, possibility and place, it resurfaced and settled in with unrelenting fervor after I spent a few days on the coast in South Africa.
There from my Airbnb, I’d intentionally get up early to watch the sun start to light up the bay stretched out before me. Losing all track of time, I’d surrender and stare out into the horizon, the clouds, the water for hours.
Back home, I watch the sunrise from my sofa in Chicago, too, but the view is closing in on me with new construction. And I can’t help but wonder if that claustrophobic sensation is signaling something greater, giving me permission to think and let go.
Home feels like it is tethering me to an out-of-date version of myself, holding me back. Blocking the winds of change.
COLLISION 00018
