“The simple everyday experiences become the doorway to new thoughts and inspirations.” – E. A. Bucchianeri

Hello sweet friends,

Have you had a wo-ah moment lately. That simple moment of noticing something that all of a sudden speaks to you. And you get it, the penny drops! Take for instance this week’s postcard. A shot from my daily walk. Do you see it, the great big doorway at the end of the avenue of trees? I walk this forest path regularly and on this day I was quite honestly captivated! How is it that on this day, it was the first time I had noticed this doorway.

When we left off in my last postcard I was planning the next section of my ‘Home to Rome’ walk. I promised you I’d be sending you a postcard from there. Alas, life happened. Lurgy struck the household. While it is easy to say no when I can’t do something, there was a nagging voice ‘… uurgh you’ve written this whole spiel in your last postcard about following cues and now you’re not even going’. I needed this walk, but also I needed to be home. The choice was easy. But what about the cues, the calling, the thing I was doing for me?

Doorways have been on my mind. What is my next big one, the one that is going to smash open the banality of what has started to feel on some days like a small life. Small town monotony and a life of tasks for others. A day or two into the cancelled Belgian walk plans, my husband’s work trip scheduled for early July cancelled. Ooooh now this blew open some weeks on the family calendar, days where I wouldn’t be the ‘needed’ adult. I should take them, the weeks/months ahead are busy. Maybe, I could actually go a little further south. Maybe, I could walk my next section of the Camino del Norte.

So yes, that is now happening. I am not picking up my camino from ‘Home to Rome’ but in fact my ‘Camino del Norte’ project. So it has taken me sometime to find the words to write about this shift. With so many changes of plans in the past years and this nagging feeling of ‘what am I doing with my life’, I was struggling to yet again not be doing something I had committed to. Determined not to fall into the ‘woe is me’ spiral I often found myself last year, I kept walking and I kept taking notice. Open.

The doorway got me feeling, but also it got me thinking. It isn’t such a bad thing to be someone who isn’t rigid in their path. Aside from the reality that this is life for me right now. Living abroad with four big kids where stuff happens and plans change, we change – daily. This shape shifting, or my need to shape shift is simply my character. It’s a part of me and I need to remember how to embrace it, to be in touch with it, to work with it from where I am and to not resist it.

Maybe, the first door is simply the one that opens into the hallway?! And hallway is the entrance into the next chapter, into your life of opportunities. Maybe from here it is ok to open doors, close doors, sit in a room for a while, move to another room, go back, find a new room, see where that goes, bring something from one room to another. Friends, I think I am on an a new kind adventure. I’m not even sure what it is, or where it’s going, but it feels a bit exciting. And it feels like it should go slow, no promises or big challenges (not yet). Just … when the moments and opportunities present themselves and they feel right – I should GRAB them, invest in them. Invest in myself.

In my head I am living in a story, a secret world where only I can escape into. Protecting this story with boundaries and truth feels like a most important thing. There’s dreaming, dancing, fairytales, romance, suspense, curiosity, interesting characters and it feels oh so bloody delicious when I am there. I have lived and learnt a lot of over the past few years and now it’s time to trust in life again. To give in. Oh AND I can’t stop writing. Writing feels like it is a big part of what is happening. That doorway, that one end of the avenue that seemed to say ‘don’t be scared, look there are soft pink cushions for you to land on, to sink safely into’ maybe, it was in fact a doorway back into a creative life via bravery. And creativity teamed with bravery, well that friends is a powerful elixir – isn’t it!