Inhale: The Voice

In a moment, life imploded on itself; the culmination of 21 cycles of experiences around the sun, the memories made, values held and perspectives formed all unhinged out of their fastened place in my being and collapsed chaotically into a mysterious cloud of empty space. While I had felt my life’s infrastructure quake and rumble beneath my feet with an increasingly threatening intensity over the past year, I did not expect the ground to crumble so abruptly, and shatter my entire life as I knew it.

I could talk about what made the past year so “difficult” and explain how life had seemed to spiral to my own all-time low. I could describe the relief and excitement to hop on a plane to Spain for the Fall, hoping that travelling would mean leaving behind all of the heaviness I had accumulated. I could take the time to describe how I across the country from Barcelona to Asturias and how somewhere in a breathtakingly beautiful and humblingly large mountain range I lost my wallet. But it really doesn’t matter.

It doesn’t matter what happened that year. It doesn’t matter what constitutes an all-time low for me. It doesn’t matter how I lost the wallet, or how I realized I lost it. It doesn’t matter about why exactly the wallet meant so much to me at the time and what the cash, the cards and ID’s mattered so much to me – just know it was not the cash or ID’s that mattered. What mattered were the symbols it held inside, and the meaning I assigned to it. What mattered was that at the time, the wallet was invaluable, and was the closest thing I had to anything that made my recent time spent, and values prioritized, justifiable.

I stood, lost on the edge of a gigantic mountain, the fiery-orange sun ball shot intense rays across the deeply colored sky as it descended behind the layers of mountains in the distance. The clouds were swiftly sledding down the mountains surrounding me and were growing close enough that I was sure I would soon be engulfed in fog.

It was there where it happened; where I felt the foundations which I had been standing on crumble from the ground beneath my feet; my sense of safety, and security, my sense of belonging and purpose, my everything crumbled with such a force, with such a rapid confidence that to attempt to hold things together any longer was as hopeless as trying to prevent the sun from setting. Gravity moved with too much certainty to do anything but to give up, cry out and fall.

And that’s what happened; I burst into tears and I cried and I cried; loud cries of despair and fear. Cries of confusion, defeat, and long awaited cries of exhaustion. I was falling. Falling from the grounds I tried so hard to keep in place, from the path that I had grown so attached to walking on; I was falling from my own understanding of the world and my own sense of self.

I blabbered out prayers to the Unknown Force I hadn’t prayed to in years. Not so much prayers to, but rather desperate requests of. Confessions were acknowledged and promises were made of the many ways I would change, if I found the wallet. It was a last resort.

It was a last, desperate attempt, in the midst of falling, to grab and stabilize the pieces of collapsing ground in hopes to climb my way up out of the abyss I was dropping into. But it was too late.

It was as though the Unknown Force itself breathed in from the core of the mountain with a strength that stripped me of anything I ever thought I was, or hoped I would be — of everything inside me but empty stillness and expansive silence. It was in this stillness and silence that a voice filled my whole experience and boomed like thunder throughout my entire existence:

“Everything is going to be okay.” 

It was the loudest, clearest thing I had ever heard, followed by the loudest silence I had ever heard. The silence was black and the silence was clean. The silence laid a canvass for the voice to simmer and echo over for an eternity. The silence was the echo itself. The voice was truth and there was no doubting that truth – I had never heard something I knew to be made of such truth. The truth had permeated through every cell of my being.

I stopped crying, not because I was happy or inspired – I certainly wasn’t. I was speechless and taken aback. I didn’t contemplate or reflect on what just happened. There was nothing to figure out. It just…. It just was.

The sun had set and the clouds were close enough that I could have hit them with a snowball. I found my way back to the road and just stood there, lost in the oddness of the moment. A muddy, white jeep came around the bend and stopped, giving me time to explain that I lost my wallet and ask the driver for help. I was neither motivated nor inspired, I was deflated and confused– but it was worth a shot. Hope peaked out from within me upon learning that the driver was a park ranger. The ranger recognized the mountains in the background of the pictures I had on my phone from where I assumed I lost the wallet. He held the phone close to his face, then far away as he studied the pictures. “Vamos,” he said.

Up the road we went, until pulling off the main path in the same familiar place I had lost the wallet – I got out of the jeep on the same slope I had before, and brushed through the same tall grass I had walked through. I followed my exact path over to an old shepherd’s hut with a thatched roof. Closer and closer I got, looking through the grass, until finally……  

I didn’t find it.
The wallet wasn’t there.

The clouds were just feet above our heads and the lack of sunlight now marked defeat. Yet the truth I had heard an hour before was just as present – everything was going to be okay. There was no happiness but there was no doubting that truth.

We got back in the jeep and headed down the road as I attempted to come to terms with beginning a long-awaited journey abroad without this wallet — there must be some life lesson I was meant to learn, but there was no joy about needing to learn it.

Instead of dropping me off like I thought the ranger would at the end of the road to the village I was staying in, he pulled in, parked and walked ahead of me into the cozy restaurant which was the downstairs of the hostel I was staying in.  He seemed to know the men from the village well who were gathered there for dinner and he sat down at their table, pouring himself a glass of wine from the glass jug they passed. I sat across the room in the corner, quite unhappy as he began recalling the story of our endeavors to them.

About an hour later another man walked in and the story came up again. It turns out, this man was just with his younger brother in the next village over, where I stayed the previous night. His brother had just told him about their cousin. And the cousin had just told this man about his best friend…. Who had just found a wallet.

Seriously.

“Did you hear that?”
“Yes I heard that.”

The man’s…brother’s…. cousin’s….friend had found a wallet on the ground and turned it into the security post. I shit you not.

I hitched a ride back to that village the next day. 

The security guard opened a small, unlocked drawer in a wooden desk. There it was. He handed the wallet to me and despite it feeling lighter, the wallet had all of the cash, cards and IDs in it.

~

Despite the same materials in the wallet, there was a newness in it – inside of the wallet were also shadows of the symbols which no longer carried the same weight; shadows made of death which gently held newborn life within them. The newness would continue to birth symbols and lessons within the wallet which may not be seen for days, months or years to come. I couldn’t put words to it, and there was no need to. The newness would soon define itself, in silence and stillness, in chaotic implosions and explosions, in the wallet, in the mountains, in the strangers and sunsets. In the intense inhales, and in the results of surrendering to Gravity and falling. What I lost was much more than that wallet, and what I found would soon be sung in every birdsong, in every sunrise, in every child’s laughter and whisper in the wind. I had no idea that I had just finished an entire cycle of my life, finished, so to begin a brand new chapter. The adventure to come was absolutely nothing I had seen coming.