Sure. Spending a year in Kosovo as a military peacekeeper was difficult. Leaving my wife, my job, our new house to pursue the Army’s objectives overseas required a large adjustment—a reorientation to life. I had a calendar in my Kosovo barracks with a large X over every day passed, counting down the days to my homecoming.

I did not foresee, however, that coming home would be more difficult than leaving home. It took me more than a year before I began to feel ‘normal’ again—like I belonged in my family, home and country. It took a week before I could leave the house. It took two weeks before I mustered the strength to go to the mall. Two months into my homecoming my wife and I agreed that I should rent a car and hit the road. I would go to Colorado to see a counselor.

While the three days I spent with a team of counselors certainly aided my recovery, nothing was as nourishing for my soul as the road itself. I set out with no itinerary but to reach Colorado in three days and come home sometime afterward. Three years later, it seems like just last week when I was kicking up gravel thirty minutes from a paved road in any direction, surrounded by buffalo and badlands; when I was watching neighbors on a reservation pound odd pieces of tin to cover holes in their roof, creating the only echoing sound across a five block town; when I set the cruise at 95 passing through Wyoming ranches without a tree in site.

I drank coffee in 6 states, but the coffee tasted best late at night in a downtown Omaha warehouse, surrounded by old brick roads and artists on the streets. I remember calling my wife from Colorado after being gone for a week, “I could do this every day.” “Do what?” she asks. “Drive. Wander.” There was silence on the other end of the line. She wanted me to want to be home. But I was experiencing an awakening. The last time I had felt this creative, this free and at peace in my thoughts, I had just started college ten years earlier.

Wandering reminded me of something I had forgotten. I was creative. I am not sure what happened on that trip, but I somehow felt divinely reassured that I was ok. Somehow, at that moment, not knowing where I was going to sleep on a given night was as important to me as life itself. For me, it seems, creativity needs space to wander, and every good journey needs a loved place to wander from. This spring my wife smiled and asked me when I was taking off; maybe she has always understood me better than I have understood myself.

More on the ascetic of wandering to come…

This entry was posted on Monday, April 2nd, 2007 at 11:00 am and is filed under Creativity, Wandering. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.