Leaving

Tomorrow I am off, on my way to Poland.

I am still finding it hard to imagine leaving, even if it is just for a month, even though I have my plane ticket and a couch surfing spot and a road trip with a Polish-Jewish family from Warsaw to Lublin on Saturday, and even though I am fully registered for the retreat at Auschwitz in a few weeks.

It's just that the orange, red, yellow leaves shaking in the tree outside my window, blazing brilliantly beside the highway against the backdrop of steady evergreen, and carpeting the earth, the porch, the windshield of my truck in brilliant color, remind me of the gravity of home. They invite me to stay, to fall here upon this earth and sink in, to offer myself as food and fertility to this place that I have long longed for and finally found--community, friends, love, work, dance, vibrancy, voice: home.

So why am I leaving? 

I still ask myself that question at a lot. I judge myself for feeling like it is such a big deal to leave for a few weeks as I watch from afar as fires and floods, earthquakes and war consume people's entire lives, histories, homes. They never get to return. They didn't have a choice. How lucky am I? To be alive? To have the possibility of a return journey home? How privileged, sheltered, safe? 

What, then, am I so afraid of? 

~~~

I like to think I am not afraid of dying, being someone who ritualizes it for self and others, who converses with Death and tries to honor her through a fullness of my living, who tries not to make decisions out of fear. But I am definitely afraid right now. I find myself looking everywhere for signs of my impending doom. And, of course, I find myself finding them.

Part of me thinks that my psyche is acutely picking up on the fact that I am willingly going where many would only consider a place of death--a place where the majority of people who went did not come back, and even those who did make that painful return journey might have been so stripped of self that perhaps "home" no longer existed as a possibility. There is a gut-level and visceral feeling of resistance to going there.

Maybe that feeling is ancestral memory that lives in my soul or in my genes--almost all of my patri-lineal ancestry had left Europe before the Holocaust or died there during. ("Why would I return to lands my family fled?" part of me asks). Or maybe the feeling is a somatic understanding of that implication of finality in "going to Auschwitz" ("Why would anyone choose to go to Auschwitz for a week?!" a friend of a friend declares about my trip). Or maybe I am still ignoring or denying an internal voice that is screaming at me to listen ("We just found home!" part of me shouts "Why are we leaving?!"). Maybe it is a mix of all these things or something else entirely. I don't get to know right now. All I know is the terror of death has filled me at some point of almost every day these past few weeks.  

~~~

"You will die," my lover said in the dim light of my room last night, and before I could scoff and say how unhelpful that is he added, "just try not to make it a physical death right now."

He's right. This is the feeling I got before my parents announced we were moving from Oregon to Washington. This is the feeling I got before my vision quest in where I was invited to die to my old self and my old life. It is the feeling I got just before a series of huge personal upheavals several years ago that I am still healing from. It is the feeling I have gotten several times this past year before potentially deadly car accidents. It is the feeling I get before a big grief ritual. Essentially, it is the feeling I get when my life is about to change--an ego death, a loss, a collapse of life-as-I-know-it.

Life is a series of deaths and rebirths, as I see it. I am lucky. The cataclysms (and near-misses) that have followed these premonitory/knowing feelings have almost always served to clear the way for something new; after the deluge, my life expands beyond anything I could have imagined before.

~~~

Whatever is at the base of this terror, the essence of the fear is that I won't get to come home at all. The upheavals of the past years have left me physically or psychically homeless and adrift and lost more often than not (except the home I have had to find and cultivate in myself). We live in a time where such displacement and homelessness is perhaps more common than exceptional. And many have it so much worse than me.

I look out at the leaves again now. The yellow ones clinging to the cherry tree, still illuminated by sunlight. The browning ones littering the ground, getting ready to feed the dark soil and roots of the tree they were borne from. The clear open space between.

Landing in Port Townsend feels like much more than an accident the longer I am here. It is as though a force beyond me was always calling me. Now I find myself sinking in here, breaking down and mingling with the soil of this place--becoming a part of it. I want more than anything to continue that process.

But it is the open space between the cherry branches and the ground that captures my attention now--the unscripted expanse where each leaf, after releasing from the limbs and before landing softly on ground, seems to be at the mercy and whim of the wind.

I do believe there is gravity of home, and tomorrow, almost inexplicably, I leave for Poland.

~~~

"Umm...why am I leaving again?!" I ask out loud for the 37th time today.

And he says the same thing he has been saying for weeks: "So that you can come home."