While in the Bellingham area, I connected with an old boyfriend whose band was playing at the Vineyards that I ride my bike past every day. I hadn’t seen him in ten years or so and he texted me from the stage asking “are you the girl on the bike?”  He ended up coming over to my camp after the show and I made us dinner and then we took a drive to Birch Bay to watch the sunset.  He told me that if I wasn’t the girl on the bike, he was wondering who was that girl?  It wasn’t where is Kaleah?  It was “who is the girl on the bike?”  Funny how some things don’t change in twenty years.

We talked about life, our relationship from the past and what went wrong.  Being emotionally detached, it was easy for both of us to have that conversation.  There was no longer a charge for either one of us where we couldn’t tell the truth without being triggered.  We were just honest!  Ironically, we didn’t have the same story or remember things the same way at all.  We both were living in two completely different realities when it came to our past relationship.  Perhaps this is how it is for so many couples.  They live in their own story about what is happening, and their stories don’t match up.

Maybe a great relationship is one where the couple can live in the same story together.  Maybe they can be detached enough from triggers to always tell the truth about their individual stories and find a way to really create a great story they both can share in.

I realized in my past relationship with this man, we had very different stories, although he did tell me he takes full responsibility for the things he said and did that were hurtful and destructive to the relationship and he jokingly promised he would never do it again.  I found myself telling the story about where I was, on an emotional level back then, the things that really effected me, and eventually caused me to walk away.

My story was that he was unphased by our breakup, went on to the next and never looked back.  His story was that he always wondered what really happened between us and why I left.  He joked about how many years it took him to get over me.  He said he learned a lot from the relationship and when I asked him what he learned, he couldn’t tell me.  He seemed to feel it was too complex to put into words.  I told him our relationship changed my life; and that was true.  We had a connection that seemed to span lifetimes and even though we have gone our separate ways, and that needed to happen, we have never forgotten what we were to each other and the child we birthed, in the form of a beautiful musical CD.

As we were driving in his van we were singing songs from our CD.  We would start to sing a part of a song and get so far and forget the words and start laughing.  We talked about the profound lyrical messages and how they really depicted the beginning of my spiritual journey.  “From the Shadows” was a collection of songs I had written that was, at that time, more about being in the shadows and not knowing how to get out.  I told him how at that time in my life I was more the caterpillar who had no idea the process I would have to go through to become the butterfly.  I said that only now am I really beginning to emerge from that cocoon.

An important part of my journey was in walking away from relationships where I didn’t feel loved, honored or respected.  This was how I loved, honored and respected myself.  I talked about how I just didn’t have the confidence in myself back then that I do now, and he said “You were pretty confident then.  You never took shit off anybody.”  We both finally found a place to put the past with each other and recognized, through all our differences and all the conflict we had together, the love and the connection would always be there.

I suppose in the end, love is the only thing that matters, and the only thing that is real.  Everything else just brings us the lessons we need to learn to heal the pain, let go of the trauma and live our best life.

When all is said and done, and we have healed the pain and the trauma from past relationships, the things that mattered so much at that time, don’t matter at all anymore.  It is all water under the bridge, and in the end, I am just the girl on the bike.

(you actually get to see photos of me this time, because my friend took them while we were at the beach.)

It is ironic how I leave the Arizona summers to get out of the intense heat and this year, in the Northwest, there are record breaking all time highs.  So in this past week I had to brave 113 degree temperatures that came right after I sprained my foot.  I had double the reason to stay in the camper with the air on and my foot elevated

I found myself riding my bike early in the morning and late at night just to prevent myself from going stir crazy.  Even with the foot issues, I’ve been able to ride, which is great. The loop I have been taking along the back country roads is exactly eleven miles and takes me approximately an hour to complete.  It is a blissful hour with fields, meadows, pine forests, streams and ponds along the way.  The smells are delightful.  I just take it all in, all the while, letting it all go.

The interesting part of this chapter of my journey is how life just sort of came to a halt.  Everything became focuses inward.  With the last years of the Covid Craze, we’ve had a lot of inside retreating going on.  But this time, I was in such a small space that there wasn’t much activity to be had, unless I was writing or working.  So there was ample time for reflecting and allowing the demons to emerge from the closet.

I suppose the demons I talk of are really the things we distract ourselves from on a daily basis through our busy-ness, our projects, our addictions and all that keeps us looking outward, rather than inward.  Sometimes there are things we don’t want to look at, or see.  As a therapist who helps people to examine deeply, their inner landscapes, I have made it a practice to examine mine on a regular basis.

Dr. Gabor Mate, a Hungarian-Canadian physician and expert in addictions, tells us that some 95 percent of our population are addicted.  We are a society of addicts.  But our addictions aren’t what we might think they are.  It isn’t just about drugs and alcohol, gambling and sex.  It is anything that distracts us from our inner world, which can be work, food, television, obsessions, relationships, projects and just about anything else.  Not only do our addictions distract us from our inner worlds, but they distract us from our connection with self, with God (as we know him/her) and with each other.  Mate tells us that lack of true human connection drives most of our addictions.  Although we are more connected than ever with the Internet, we are also more isolated than ever, because our lives have gone Online.

There was a point where I thought all this empty space I had been given was a sign that it was time to write my next book, but then I realized this was just another preoccupation.  It wasn’t yet time for that endeavor.  It was time to be in the stillness and know myself on deeper and deeper levels, face the loneliness, the isolation and the disconnection within myself.

Things are cooling down a bit here in Eastern Washington.  Next week I will be heading over the North Cascades Pass, now a National Park, to Western Washington, the land of my birth.  It is much cooler over there and so I will emerge from the camper and be out in the world much more.  I look forward to it, but for now, I will enjoy the sabbatical and hopefully emerge having slayed the dragons of the past and embracing a more authentic and renewed SELF.