The Story of Coming to Decide to Leave
prologue note, written and posted in Mean Mug Coffee Shop in Chattanooga, Tennessee,
October 20, 2022:
I keep going back to the beginning.
To how to begin this tale of how I came to ride on the wind whipping me along The Wild Way Home.
I've said some of what I'm about to say before, in different words, from different angles, differently ordered. And yet, there's something to the spirit of the below piece I want to share with you. Hell, maybe of all the beginnings I'm playing around with, this will be the one makes it into the book.
It's the first draft I wrote with the expressed purpose of explaining to my readers-to-be how I arrived upon the verge of another Grand Adventure, how I'd weathered all the defining expeditions and devastating impediments that delivered me to that edge from which I would fling myself soon enough.
At this rate, it's going to take longer than I thought to get to the (good!) part where I actually, physically take off on the Wild Way.
But, that's how it was, leaving, too:
A Universe of false starts that finally exponentiated into the end of everything I'd ever known, and the beginning of The Wild Way Home. p.s. Legit, as I write this, Coldplay's "The Scientist" is playing in the background of this coffeeshop...
"Nobody said it was easy
Oh, it's such a shame for us to part
Nobody said it was easy
No one ever said it would be so hard
I'm going back to the start ..."
...Early February, 2021
Evening
Chamberlin Inn, Cody, Wyoming
Well, let’s start this journey together.
I’ve been putting off really beginning for awhile, you know.
And here I am.
And here you are.
And we’re ready.
So let’s go.
...
Founding my Divinity School
We'll start with Guatemala.
I’m not going to go too deep into it — you can read more about my time in Guatemala in the chapter I wrote in the book Visionary: The Future Belongs To Those Who Can See In The Dark (my chapter is called "Living from the Heart").
For now, I want you to know I spent February through July of 2021 in Guatemala, mostly living with a host family in the city of Xela. While there, I started my own creative platform, with intention, for the very first time. That looked like starting a YouTube channel. I named it Divinity School.
Maybe finding me through youtube is how you came to be reading my writing. Or maybe you’re a family member, or a friend, or an acquaintance, or a stranger who went down an interminable internet rabbit hole and somehow landed here. You may even have come as sworn adversary doing your research on how to bring me down.
Whatever brought you here, honestly, I’m glad you’re here to read about what I’m doing.
Because I’ve been wondering what the hell I’ve been doing, too.
...
Divinity School started out as a spirituality-focused channel.
Spirituality was, in so many ways, this major part of myself I’d been hiding. It signified a piece of me I urgently needed to free, to let fly in the world where people could see. Then, to watch what came of such flight.
And I did that with Divinity School.
I said fuck it to applying to Harvard Divinity School, which was legit what I thought I needed to do in order to validate my view on my own spiritual experience and learning and growth and reckoning and riffing. A dear, brilliant, badass friend and Divine Feminine Mentor, Leigh Jane Woodgate, in true native Aussie fashion said, "Yeah, naaaaaah. ... You’re making your own Divinity School."
And thus was my youtube channel named.
The Trail of Stories that Led Me Here
Lemme back up a sec, and let you know: I’ve been writing and creating content since I could wield a pen.
Originally I went to school for journalism at Medill School of Journalism at Northwestern University — a big dream of mine from my days as high school newspaper (Cody High School's The Equus) editor-in-chief. Going to Medill — then the best undergraduate school of journalism in the country — marked the achievement of a major dream ... and left my soul empty after a year in urban madness among a sea of sororities.
I transferred to Montana State University in Bozeman (one of my favorite towns in the USA) and graduated with a Bachelor’s degree in Sociology and Political Science. All the while I continued writing and publishing in various publications.
I went on to freelance in content curation and marketing for the next ten years, creating for everything from local news outlets to industry magazines to non profits to creative artists to entrepreneurial shops to national organizations to international companies ... (I also nannied, waitressed, ran a horse barn, worked at a bookstore, trained camels, guided treks, and did a bunch of other cool shit in the midst of working from my computer).
Taking a Hard Spiritual Turn
When I was in Guatemala during covid with lots of time to consider my life, it hit me hard and fast: I never had turned my creative and documentative skills onto myself.
Sure, a bit, on instagram and facebook ... but I never wrote nor publicly spoke about what deeply interested and compelled and mesmerized me — like spirituality and philosophy and sexuality and the intersection of these with sociology, politics, magic, myth, and religion.
So I started a youtube channel on spirituality.
And I went waaaaaaaaay spiritual.
Full spiritual, as I was basically living in an in between sort of realm during my time in Guatemala, often meditating for up to four hours a day and spending the great majority of my time alone, what time I did physically pass with people speaking only Spanish.
I went hard into the realm of the ethereal because something inside me snapped. I was just so damn done with the material, the outside validation, the logic, the linear, the tangible, the masculine energy of proving and hustling and doing doing doing.
I wanted something beyond proof — I wanted Love, the Eternal, the intangible, the spirit realm. I wanted to be in a magical place.
Yes, that's what I wanted: Magic. To return to when and where magic was and is real, like I'd always known ... always felt ... it to be.
Breaking Ground for divinity ranch
All this brings us back to what Divinity School transformed into after I returned to the United States, to Wyoming, to my family's ranch and the horses and the prairie and the perpetual atmospheric cloud of creative community — divinity ranch.
Here's what divinity ranch is now for me:
A place to believe in magic, a place to meet and discuss and digest and commune with anything and anyone in that simultaneously secret and welcoming, beautiful, playful, safe, authentic feeling where our realest wholest selves can find a place to belong (Secret Garden vibes, y’all).
divinity ranch-inspired energy and intention can blossom within, at any time. This enchanting spell of acceptance can be cast in any place.
Anytime, anywhere, we can meet where we still believe in magic. Knowing that magic is real, that anything is possible, we also know no problem is too great to confront and talk about, no topic too taboo or not "spiritual" enough.
Unconscious Politics
I’ve already been told off after recently posting a video celebrating having a woman in the White House. And while my political interest has not been as keen as it once was (I was originally a journalism major in college, okay), to me, political reflections are vitally important in the lens of the collective unconscious.
For instance, all we Americans up to this point in history share the memory that women have had no place at the top, since no woman ever has been in the White House as President or Vice President until now.
So a woman (and a Woman of Color, at that!) being in the White House is something political as well as spiritual and energetic to celebrate for women. It changes our deepest-held beliefs about what's possible, and about how we (consciously and unconsciously) look at women and People of Color. And if anyone doesn’t want to hear that, they have the free will to leave my creative world (byyyyyye!).
If you say "spirituality and politics don’t mix," (as someone commented on one of my youtube videos), you might as well say, "spirituality and humans don’t mix." The word politics refers to the body politic of PEOPLE. Essentially, "politics" means "people."
We acknowledge spiritual truths that apply to people, like, "We create our own reality." If that's true, though, why would we need to pay attention to shit going on in the world of politics?
Because the conscious and the unconscious inform each other. We look at what's going on, for real, in the outside (conscious) world to note what lives in our hidden (unconscious) inner world ... We unflinchingly observe and acknowledge inner truths in order to revise them, which in turn changes our outer world.
If we really want to get intentional about what we’re creating (both as individuals and as a society), we better look at the unconscious — both our own and that of the collective — because in the shadows lives who’s really directing the show.