Safe Passage

I’m driving down Lamar in Austin, Texas, thinking about a card I pulled this morning titled Safe Passage, (from the Abacus Corvus Wild Chorus Deck) this is a note to myself and you about the journey ahead, and the time I’m in both as an individual and as part of the collective.

I have been here before, and yet this time I have more tools, more resources.

I have walked this stretch of Lamar many times in my youth, houseless, looking for a cigarette or a free cup of bottomless coffee. Now I’m almost forty, living comfortably, loved, making art and passing through my shadow self. The streets tell stories. They hold histories, my own and so many others’. Did my phantom self know I would one day be back here? Does my adult self fully understand that I am no longer that young one, seeking solace one day at a time?

Maybe this is the wisdom of Rumi: what you seek is seeking you. Not in real time, but across a lifetime. I am reaching forward and back toward myself, seeking wholeness.

I am moving from Austin, returning to the East Coast after six years back here. I have lived all over the U.S., and much of my sense of self has been shaped by transience: picking up and leaving, rooting and uprooting and rooting again. Always moving. Always starting over. I even changed my name a few times as a kid when I moved, a whole new me each time.

This move feels different. In my adult life, I’ve gone from Chicago to the Bay Area, back to Chicago, to New York, to Austin. The pandemic pushed me here. I didn’t want to return. I carried unhealthy relationships and painful memories from the six years I lived here on and off between the ages of nine and eighteen. It wasn’t at the top of my list to live in a red state, near a family member deeply tied to my wounding and the phantom ghosts of some of my hardest childhood and teenage years.

And yet, what was meant to be a few weeks, just “sitting the pandemic out”, became a six-year turn of the wheel of life. A long season of healing, reflection, and profound shifting.

I am leaving better than I came. More grounded. More free. More devoted to my own becoming, if somewhat battle-scarred along the way.

As I drive this street now, I see it with the eyes of someone who believes what they’re seeing precisely because it’s about to become ephemeral, soon folded into memory, into a “time when.” This too shall pass.

The other day I pulled out my old Narcotics Anonymous book and reread notes written by other kids in a Florida rehab back in 2002, when I first left. In the early years, I would read those notes often and think about those kids. Later, it became harder, to look, to remember that version of myself, to even reflect on my own reflection. Who was this person? Who was I to others? And how did we get here, of all places?

I opened the book to the Seventh Step. Underlined and highlighted:

“Humility is a result of getting honest with ourselves… We are people who have assets and liabilities. Most importantly, we are human… It is time to ask for help and relief. We have to understand that our way of thinking is not the only way; other people can give us direction. When someone points out a shortcoming, our first reaction may be defensive.”

This idea was deeply freeing for me. It helped crack open my understanding of the world. In my younger years, when I moved to Chicago and was challenged around white privilege and power, I felt that defensiveness sharply, the collision of complex, intersecting identities. But in NA, I had learned that defensiveness was a signal: something here wants to be examined. That framework softened me. It opened me to what my friends and teachers were sharing about race, history, and responsibility. It helped me grow.

Reading those old highlights now, on the brink of leaving Austin, at the turn of the year, in this moment we’re living through, it all echoes itself. Seeking itself backward and forward. And once again, I return to Safe Passage as the card of this time.

“You’ve been here before, and you’re better prepared this time. High five your travel partners, your future self, and believe in the likelihood of a good outcome.”

Wishing us all safe passage in this time.