Archive for October, 2008

We have been in Tucson, AZ since Sunday, after a tiring 2.5 day drive from deep in the heart of Texas.  We LOVE it here….Peter and I lived here for almost 5 years; Jess was born here (and therefore qualifies for native “desert rat” status) and Aidan was concieved here (oh, you probably didn’t want to know that!)  In short, we have deep ties to this laid-back southern Arizona town.

It is nice to come to a place that has such fond memories for us.  Pete and I really struck out on our own for the first time here, leaving our southern roots and families to “seek our fortune out west”.  We grew up a lot here, and learned much about ourselves.  We explored this state with a hunger to know it inside and out.  I would venture to say that I know Arizona better than I know my own home state of North Carolina!

I am also blessed to have my Aunt Wendy here; she has become more of a mother figure to me than an aunt, and it is really lovely to connect with her when we come here.  My grandmother is also here; we enjoy taking the opportunity to visit with her and let the boys spend a little time with their Great Grandmother.  Aren’t they beautiful?

We are doing all the nutty running around, getting errands done before we leave the state and make our way into California.  I am nervous about how crowded things are there, and imagine it will be lots more expensive to travel there than anywhere else we have gone.  I was a bit of a stress monkey today as we made reservations and tried to figure out how to navigate around Los Angeles…I felt my heart close up and I credit my son, Jess, with asking me the quiet questions to crack me open again.  I had a little cry, expended the pent-up energy, and was all better. 

We plan to be here until Sunday morning…we will travel across I-8 to San Clemente, where we will say hello to the Pacific!

We also took time to see the Texas State Aquarium on Corpus Christi Beach.  It is a smaller facility than we are used to for an aquarium, but it made up for size in quality.  I had particularly sweet interactions with the sea turtles, which crowded around to pose for my camera (I must have been standing where they are fed or something!)

The boys enjoyed the Big Tank…Peter is a huge fishing enthusiast and lamented being unable to catch some of the prize redfish on display:

Da Berry Boys posing in front of the Big Tank

We were guided to leave Corpus on Wednesday, October 16^th…so we pretty much had the RV ready by then.  As we left, we gassed up at the local Valero, and were shocked to see that gas prices had dropped to $2.32 a gallon!  We took a picture because we know we won’t likely see that price again!

The 16^th we headed up to San Antonio….again, we were guided to go there.  We thought we were going so that we could have the car serviced (40,000 miles in 16 months!)  But it turned out there was something more special in store!

At close to time to make supper, I received a call from a man who said he had seen our website and that his family was planning a cross-country trip to see National Parks.  He had received our web address from a woman who had met us 4 years ago, when we were on our first big trip and were stationed at Padre Island National Seashore as volunteers.  She remembered us and passed our contact info on to him as a resource for his own family’s trip.  Usually a procrastinator by his own admission, he called on this night to ask some questions.  He said he had seen we were in Texas to get the RV, and wondered if we were still in the state.  I told him we had just left Corpus Christ, but we were staying in San Antonio until the following morning, when we would be heading west.  He paused for just a moment before he said, “I live in San Antonio!” 

This is exactly the kind of thing that used to happen to us all the time on our previous journey…the magic of synchronicities became so common place that we expected them.  It was so fun to feel the “magic window” open up again for this kind of happening!  He suggested our families meet for dinner at a famous burger joint in town…we did, and we spent hours talking and answering their questions.  They are very special people and I want to pass their website on to you to see what they are up to.  Their current plan is to disembark in December.  We can’t wait to meet up with them on the road somewhere out there!

We left San Antonio on Friday, October 17^th and headed west on highway 90; we slept at Alpine, Texas at the Lost Alaskan RV park, where Susan in the office was an absolute hoot (the park was great, too, except that the pool was closed down for the year).  As we drove away from Alpine the following morning, I had the sense that we wouldn’t be seeing Texas (or, Tejas in Spanish) again for a long time.  The sweet rolling hills and live oak trees are so very beautiful there.

Thank you, Tejas, for the memories!

So next…..a night in Deming, New Mexico on our way to Tucson AZ.  We will be in Tucson for the week of October 19-25.  More soon!

We have officially left Texas, ya’ll!

When we arrived down in the Corpus Christi area to fetch the RV on October 5th, it was a balmy 90 degrees and the soft, moist air billowed our sails after a LONG drive down from Colorado.  After waking up to 30 degree mornings back home, the warmth was a welcome change.  Felt like vacation all over again!  We found out later it snowed the day after we left.  Hee hee, good timing, Universe!

We promptly scurried around, getting the RV back into live-in condition and doing the inevitable shopping to re-outfit us.  We fell into an easy pattern within 3 days….we know this routine so well after traveling together for those 2 years!  We parked (I just cannot, in good conscience, use the word “camped”) at a GREAT place in Portland, Texas, right on the bay across from downtown Corpus Christi, called Sea Breeze.  The water was lovely, the fishing was good, the skyline lights at night were jewel-like.  It was a perfect spot to regroup after leaving Colorado and to prepare for our sojourn. I was asked by my dear friend Elizabeth Barbour what it was like being back in the RV again, and I was happily surprised to hear myself say that it was a breeze.

For those of you who have not gone RVing for any length of time, there is an entire lifestyle and culture that goes along with it.  I was reminded as we did our laundry at the recreation building and was chatting with other RVers how much I enjoy the core devotion to freedom that Rvers seem to embody.  It is an unspoken, but highly respected value that we hold dear.  I imagine this is true for anyone who seems to have travel in their blood!

We went to Padre Island a couple of times to play in the gulf….the water was clear and gorgeous…however the beach was covered in trash washed ashore from Hurricane Ike, which hit north of Corpus Christi at Galveston.  I found a computer, a toy chest, electric outlets, shoes, and plastic, plastic, plastic.  It made me renew my commitment to buy as little plastic as possible….there was no end of the horrid stuff littering the beaches for miles.  It was an odd feeling to see these pieces of people’s homes tossed so indiscriminately and deposited on this wild stretch of beach.

For educational supplementation, I took the boys to see the replica of Columbus’ ship, Nina, which sits on the Corpus Christi Bay waterfront in downtown.

 More in Part 2……..

It seems that if something is moving, alive, and on a journey of any kind, then it will meet with obstacles, unfriendly winds, dangerous weather, or sudden and unforeseen changes that cause a slight (or major) shift from the originally intended direction. 

I am of the belief and knowing that everything is alive, even the things we call inanimate….I see that a rock or a book or a star dissolve over time, and so are on their own journey of change.  Even at an atomic level, one of our most basics parts, where there is agreement to come together to act as a table, to organize as a body of water, to serve as a piece of fruit, there is motion and expansion and evolution of self, or a journey towards fulfillment of purpose. 

But a journey constitutes movement, and movement constitutes change…..and meeting up with the rest of All Creation….and therefore the “wild card” of Course Correction.

I capitalize Course Correction here because sometimes these surprising reminders of our connection to everything in the web of creation come in degrees. 

Sometimes they arrive in mini packages….like a notice in the mail that we are slightly overdue on a bill, or a test score returned to us that reveals our knowledge of the material as less than the A-plus we thought we’d achieved.  Ah, we say, no big deal, I’ll take care of this now….I’ll make a slight adjustment to my behaviors and choices and will get the desired outcome.

Moving up the scale are the middle of the road Course Corrections….the difficult relationship in the office that causes you to seek a promotion to a different department, the house roof that won’t stop leaking until you break down and re-roof, the car that goes flat after a slow leak…..this type of course correction gets your attention in slightly more demanding ways, requiring a little more effort and conscious awareness to change your behavior and choices to get the desired outcome.

And then there are the larger Course Corrections, the GrandDaddy of the Course Corrections, the ones that make us stop in our tracks, the ones that cause our brains to pause thinking and our hearts almost to stop beating….those proverbial “divine 2 by 4’s” to the head.  I tend to think these occur because we weren’t paying attention to the little course corrections before the big Course Correction had to occur to finally get our attention.  Some examples of the Big Course Correction may be the auto accident, the unexpected divorce, diagnosis of ill health, the loss of our retirement stock portfolio or loss of any kind…the kind that will bring you to your knees.

Course correction of any degree is a necessary partner of any journey….when you start out on a journey of any kind, you state your intention in the beginning about where you want to wind up; or if the journey is just to go with the flow and be in the moment, without any arrival point, that is an intention, too.  But inevitably, we can get pulled off course, by lack of attention on our part, like the captain of a ship falling asleep at the wheel and being blown off-course….or because we have driven ourselves in a direction which is not congruent with our stated intention or purpose of the journey.  In that case, the universe will obligingly remind us of our original intention and ask gently (at first), “Are you sure this is where you want to go?  You seem to have made a wrong turn back there.”  Of course, then it is up to us to choose to listen or not.

I am of the mind that the universe is actually supporting us when it throws up the course correction….that it is invisibly cooperating with us in our efforts to get somewhere.

I believe the global economy is going through one serious Course Correction; we were certainly given the messages prior to the Big One we are getting right now that things were not working in integrity in the financial sector.  I guess not enough of us were paying attention, and so the 2 by 4 was prepared.  Many of us are really scared right now….and I understand that.  But I also believe that this was a necessary part of balancing out what couldn’t continue.  I do see it as being a good thing in the end.

Many times in my own life have I experienced the occasionally upsetting, certainly confounding and always, in the end, rewarding inevitability of course correction.  I have found that if I pay attention early to the little, mini course corrections, and shift accordingly, I don’t have the major pain and upset that comes with dealing with the Big Course Corrections.  Call it selfish, I call it self preservation….I don’t favor pain much, so I choose to be alert to the messages the universe drifts my way early and often.  When I haven’t caught the messages early, I have been given the opportunity to learn a hard lesson.

Our family also knows to be alert to course corrections as we journey, both inwardly and outwardly.  Within the spirit and psyche of each of the four of us, we are taking many journeys….and the physical journey we are undertaking is an apt metaphor for those other journeys. 

We found the last time that we did this that we did not wind up going where we thought we would….our intention was to be present, to be soulful, to love one another…..and so our journey was shaped and charted by those holy intentions.  In our minds we thought we would go all over the country, here and there to places we wanted to visit, but the greater intention overrode those egoic desires.  The universe supported our original grand intention and corrected us when we veered off course.  We eventually got into a rhythm of being so present and alert that we had very few course corrections by the end. 

But over the couple of years that we settled in Colorado, we got a little unconscious again….it took a few course corrections to get us to this point, where we are on the road once more.  Now that we are here, in the familiar RV that has a different backyard every place we go, and in such close proximity to one another, the old awarenesses are flooding back.  We are listening deeply again for the pulse that guided us so exquisitely before…and I feel us getting closer and closer to it.      

In what ways have you observed course corrections work magic in your own life?  Are you experiencing one right now? 

The Wanderin’ Berrys, Chapter Two

Greetings!

Those of you who have followed our story since we left our “normal” lives in Asheville, NC in 2003 know that we took an epic 2-year journey in order to re-grow the connections in our family; it resulted in phenomenal restoration of our love for each other, intense emotional, mental and spiritual growth, and attention from around the world via our family website, www.berrytrip.us.  Our story was even published by Jack Canfield and Mark Victor Hansen in their book, Life Lessons for Mastering the Law of Attraction (not the title when we submitted the story!)

Berrys at the Beach, 2008-Cape San Blas, Florida

Since our trip ended in 2005, we have been living in a lovely remote area of southern Colorado, high in the Rockies…it was a perfect place to land after being mobile for such a long time.  We needed the boundless quiet, the profound, jaw-dropping beauty of Nature, and a really, really small town to start to make our way back into civilization.  We thought we would be there for several years, but we quickly outgrew it!

View from our front porch in Colorado, March 2006

When we all started to experience boredom and restlessness, we knew that we needed a change.  At first we thought we would relocate somewhere new, like a bigger city, or a different landscape.  We considered Florida and Texas due to the proximity to the Gulf of Mexico (one of our favorite playgrounds)….but the more we got still to listen to our deep inner voices, the more we started understanding that it wasn’t time to move into a new place…..it was time to MOVE.

And so, we begin Chapter Two of the Berry journey….we left our 40-acre serene Colorado homestead on the market and have taken off for parts unknown…

We begin in Corpus Christi, Texas where we left the RV (whose name is Jude….the Wandering Jude, get it?)  We will travel westward, listening to our inner guidance each day for direction and feeling our way around until……well, until we stop!

Join us here for our thoughts as we travel, artistic and thoughtful contributions by the boys, and my observations as a Mother whose soul longs to offer the best children to this world that I can.

Welcome!

Xoxoxo

licia