First and quickly that chilly March, I drove the southernmost route across the country to California. Then I wandered up and down the California and Oregon coasts, exploring and drifting. Most of the time all I "worked" at was my tan and listening in to the, till then, unheard parts of myself. Lazing and napping in the sun, I sometimes crocheted cotton bikinis, silly hats and later chunky sweaters. I rode the racing bike that I’d hung on a rack on my van for some part of everyday. I walked on the beaches, sometimes on trails and, in Big Sur, along endless miles on the side of the Pacific Coast Highway.

Gradually I narrowed my roving range. I moved back and forth between campgrounds and safe roadside nooks in Santa Barbara and Big Sur. From the first time I’d seen them on a solo vacation in 1967, these two geographies had felt, in some indefinable ways, like "home" to me. Though at first I kept very much to myself, I felt a deep sense of belonging and a great inner peace in each of these places.

Sometimes I took breaks from my rather footloose, fairly solitary life and went north to San Francisco. There I had a kind of "family" base. I’d park my van outside the home of my oldest college best friend. Each night I’d retreat to my van-womb to sleep and ground myself. Most days, I’d join in the family’s complex and textured life. As a rather eccentric quasi-aunt, I slipped quite easily and seamlessly into the fabric of life with my dear friend, her eclectic husband and their three amazing young children.

Well into that first year on the road, I began experimenting with being a little more "plugged-in" and connected in both of my geographical "home-places." For a while, I shop-sat a couple of days a week at a small boutique booth in a 1970’s style indoor marketplace in downtown Santa Barbara. There I sold my growing collection of hand crocheted bikinis, hats, ski sweaters and the fabric creations of the two other women with whom I collectively rented the space. In the marketplace I came to meet a whole host of alternative artisans. Occasionally, I spent time outside the marketplace getting to know some of these very lively and delightful women.

A bit later on, I experimented with intermittently baking in an organic bakery collective in Santa Barbara a couple of early mornings a week. I acted as the bakery’s sales rep on my frequent jaunts to Big Sur. On my bakery sample runs, I began meeting the, until then, "invisible" locals of Big Sur. There, too, I began getting to know some incredibly interesting alternative/drop-out folks.

As I got to know people in both places, I began sometimes to park my van in people’s driveways rather than on the streets of Santa Barbara or the pull-outs on Pacific Coast Highway in Big Sur. And, I started being less totally solitary.

For some nine months I sort of lived mostly on the roads in Big Sur. I got to regularly use the mineral baths at Esalen during the nighttime hours set aside for local residents. I explored the local trails, hung out with some fascinating women and some very odd men. Sometimes I did stints as a guest-baker in Esalen’s kitchen. I picked miners’ lettuce, mustard and horseradish greens and even some watercress growing wild in the mountains and creeks for "wild salad picnics" alone and with friends. I did some odd jobs as a carpenter’s apprentice.

After a time, I found myself disenchanted with life in Big Sur as I was living it. The social/sexual "scene" came to feel way too incestuous, inbred, weird and disappointing. Coming from the east coast’s high feminist consciousness, it was painful to watch the same old-same old tired sexual politics playing out between the seemingly powerful women and the typically adolescent men in that tiny community. And I realized that, after my long season of chosen solitariness, I was yearning to try my wings at becoming a real part of a larger community again

With hardly any inner turmoil, I pulled up the tentative roots I’d laid there. It was clearly no longer feeling like the right time or right place for me to be. (I actually kept just one friendship from that time.) After a trip to San Francisco to regroup, I headed south to explore poking around in the feminist/activist community in Santa Barbara.

In that late November of 1974, at 34 and after almost two years of my transient, van-lady existence, a series of magical moments unfolded that led me into a job, an apartment and the beginning of a more rooted existence in Santa Barbara. A place I then lived for six years.

I’d come back to town and as usual checked in again with a couple of women I’d met and gotten particularly close to earlier on in my travels. These were very extraordinary, dear women who had been willing to develop really intense, open, intimate friendships with me despite my peripatetic habits and non-reciprocal accessibility–no phone, only an occasionally visited post box and periodic, unpredictable departures for indeterminate sojourns in Big Sur or San Francisco.

Both of them were very active in the alternative/feminist healthcare community. (Those were the early days yet of legal abortion/birth control clinics.) The day I arrived, they colluded to present me with a high-pressured proposal that I apply for the opening as Health Education Coordinator at one of the three local free clinics. The position was part of the existing five-woman collective of which one of these two friends was already a functioning member. I’d arrived in Santa Barbara the day before the deadline for applications closed, so they were very pushy! Still, It felt to me like a really intriguing possibility.

I stayed up that night handwriting, by battery lantern, my letter of intention/ application. The next morning, using a friend’s address, I signed up for a Santa Barbara library card on my way back from submitting my application. It was an act of prayer and a commitment to putting down firm new roots.

Within three more days I had been interviewed and offered the job. The same day the offer came, I found an ad for a small affordable furnished apartment down near the beach, just a block away from one of my safe overnight van-parking places. I moved in two days later. Adding some plants, rearranging the furniture, (covering the worst of it with Indian print bedspreads from the thrift store) I was suddenly a "normal" regularly locatable person again. For two or three months, as I transitioned from having been in total charge of my accessibility (or inaccessibility as the case might be), I refused to have a phone. I coped, instead, with unpredictable arrivals on my doorstep–learning to say "no"s" when I wasn’t feeling available for contact.

Two weeks after I’d accepted the offer, I began my first "real job" in almost two years. It was exciting, challenging, stretching, hilarious fun, crazy, intense, contentious some of the time, operating in crisis mode almost all of the time: the "full catastrophe!" It was oddly, an amazingly smooth transition for me from full-time drifting-freedom into 5-day weeks and full-on people contact doing free health care education at the "Freedom Clinic." I loved it! It felt just exactly right for where I was at that particular moment.

Under the banner of "Health care for people not for profits!" the clinic was a radical health care delivery system dedicated to educating people about their rights as patients/consumers of medical services. To demystifying illness and medical treatment. To providing people with useful, user friendly preventative mental and physical health care information and to providing essentially cost-free health care services. Our support staff of patient advocates, counselors and clinic receptionists were trained volunteers. All of our services and much of the medications prescribed were provided without cost or by donation. County funds, foundation grants and private donations paid the salaries of our coordinating and medical staff.

As the job took shape, my primary responsibilities involved giving talks as well as developing recruiting/training/coordinating procedures for staffing a speakers’ bureau for invited presentations at public high schools and junior highs. We offered talks on contraception, sexually transmitted diseases, alternative lifestyles (lesbian and gay speakers’ panels) and preventive mental/physical health care.

There were also numberless meetings among the coordinating staffs at all three free clinics in town. There were various trainings we all either coordinated or participated in concerning preventive mental and physical health care. For the three of us who were not directly involved in the running the medical clinics, there were pamphlets to write and a weekly public radio talk show to produce on similar topics. There were columns for our newsletters, fund appeals letters and letters to continually lobby our County Supervisors for county funding of our projects and programs. There were peer counselors and patient advocates to oversee. And an intensive training program for peer mental health counselors at the three clinics to be developed and implemented. All five of us regularly rotated staffing "bummer squads" at all local concert venues where we were available to talk people down from bad drugs and bad trips.

In addition to our own weekly coordinating meetings and the endless grant writing, all of us in the collective also did all of the usual "shit work" of secretarial support, janitoring, "go-fering," mimeographing (it was pre-computer days!), and preparing mailings. It was a lot of intense, committed, socially conscious work that kept on growing and expanding week by week!

There was for me, in the earliest days, exhilaration and joyfulness at finding myself in the middle of such a wonderful, radical agenda for helping build a healthy community. It felt enlivening to be engaged with these intensely committed women and the extended "family" of the staffs at all three free clinics.

After a few months though, things began to slip. Everyone who’d been there before I came had already been running on overload for a very long time. Two of the women were financially struggling single moms who were also going to school part-time The other two were RN’s who carried the enormous clinical responsibility while also working toward nurse practitioner degrees. I was "fresh blood," rested, with no other commitments, excellent verbal skills and some credible amount of political savvy.

While I wanted to share my skills and support their process, they wanted and desperately needed to offload some of their overwhelming burdens. "It would be so much more efficient/faster/easier if you just would do it rather than walk me through it" was the more and more familiar drill. It proved nearly impossible for me to say the "no’s" I’d worked so hard to become adept at saying in all other contexts.
It was a slippery slope right back into the kind of overwhelmed, over-responsible over-extended, over-achieving, perfectionistic, exhausting life I’d dropped out of just a little more than two years before in New York City. I felt totally lost, confused, paralyzed. I kept trying to talk about it with my colleagues who tried to hear me but were totally immersed in the same way of being as if it were the natural and reasonable way to be.

I spent endless hours trying to think the situation through; trying to figure out how I might redirect the flow, drop some of what seemed way too much for me. Every plan I might begin to evolve foundered when I recognized the burn-out everyone else had been dealing with and enduring for so much longer than my own short few months.

I cried a lot, while walking along the beach or curled up at night in my little apartment. I was feeling so utterly and endlessly frustrated with myself and my predicament. I couldn’t believe I had locked myself into something like this all over again, after all the work I’d done with myself in my two years "alone." It all felt so hopelessly muddled as I tried, without any success, to figure out ways to go part time, ways to divest of at least some of the burdens.

Finally, my back went out and I was reduced to a quivering puddle. Sleeping on the floor in my bedroom barely able to care for myself and no longer able to think at all, I gave up the struggle. My body forced me to take a complete break.

As I slept and rested and hurt and cried and breathed through all the pain, both physical and emotional, I began at last to just listen to my "belly" feelings. I gave up trying to figure things out, I gave up trying to make this whole thing work. I gave up feeling bad and wrong for needing so desperately to say "no" to all of this "important political work." I gave up feeling bad and wrong for not being willing to sacrifice my well being in the same ways my colleagues had willingly been doing for so much longer. I gave up feeling like a hopeless failure because what I’d work out in my by-myself space didn’t readily translate out into the working-with-people space.

Listening to the truths of my "belly" feelings, I could refuse to feel bad and wrong because I so needed to drop out yet again. I could refuse to feel defeated because I now understood I needed to go back inward to the "drawing boards." That I needed to learn from this devastating experience something about how to support my not sliding into these old habits when I ever again engaged in a committed way with other people.

Listening to and trusting my "belly" feelings, I understood that there wasn’t a way I could make it okay for them and okay for me, that I had to exit as quickly and cleanly as possible. Listening to my "belly" feelings, I was able to write a caring, care-full and careful letter of resignation and from outside the system, to support the collective in its transition and search for my replacement.
The whole devastating and painful process taught me an unforgettable lesson: Most often, when we’re frozen, paralyzed or stymied by confusion and doubt, our minds are the least likely source for getting clarity. In these moments and the moments when we feel trapped in predicaments where there seem to be no acceptable choices, the only possible path is always to listen inward for the truths and knowings in our "belly" feelings. Listening to those truths gives us the courage to move forward in ways that take the best care of us.

And, the only way to be able to hear those feelings is to stop the "noise" of all the thinking, figuring, talking and doing. Taking a break, a solitary walk, a nap if we can (for dreaming) or just slowing down to breath deeply and to watch our breath–any of these can be a magical doorway into that deep knowing place. That place is always there inside of us. If we can but focus to listen to it, It will always show us the way.

Consider listening inward to your "belly" feelings when you feel confused or any other time you remember that it’s a possibility always available to you,

P.S. So many of your delicious e-mails send appreciations for the affirmation, support and nourishment you receive from the site. When I answer them, I don’t always remember to let you know that having your own deck of the Rememberings and Celebrations cards is a way to bring this same loving voice into your everyday world, to have it at hand as you need to remind yourself of the "real" truth moment to moment in the crazimakingness of the so-called real world!

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The card on this page is part of a set of 64 handcolored bookmark-size cards called the Rememberings and Celebrations deck. They can be used as an oracle, a meditation focus or a "book-in-pieces" to kindle and grow a compassionate, gentle, unconditionally loving, fiercely protective inner-Mother to help you carve safe healing space for your emerging self and for the wounded little ones inside.

If you'd like a deck of your very own to support you in your journey, click here to download Order Form.

Please feel free to e-mail me at rposin@hotmail.com. to share your reflections and responses to any or all of what you find here . I'd really like to hear what touches and nourishes you!