If anyone has seen my clarity, will you get it back to me?

I love travel. *Love* it. I love seeing new places, meeting new people, and seeing people that I already know and love. I love making the new place “mine” by finding out the closest place where I can buy agave nectar or a favorite toothpaste. I love walking down an unfamiliar street and soaking up as much as I can about it, and then going back the next day with the perspective of new-found familiarity and a bit of propriety. I love what going to new places brings out of me: a sense of confidence, of competence, of expansion and growth.

I say of all this to inform how the last seven months of my life have been. Driving across the country and hitting the stops of Vancouver BC, San Francisco, Los Angeles, Tucson, Sedona, the Grand Canyon, Albeuerque, West Memphis, Yellow Springs, New York, Boston, Chapel Hill, and then finally, Miami, has been wonderful, amazing, fantastic. Not only did I get to see many people who have been long-time friends and chosen family, but I also had the space and time for meditative contemplation and reflection while spending whole days driving. It was blissful, it was relaxing, it was heart-warming to have people that I love want to see me and reconnect with me.

And then arriving in South Florida has simply been a continuation of my cross-country journey, but instead of getting myself oriented to a different town every day, I oriented myself to one city and its many different areas. Folks here are still surprised that I know both Miami-Dade and Broward counties as well as I do, but to me they are extensions of the same thing, and both merit knowledge and familiarity. I threw myself right into the mix of meeting people, of going to events, making friends, and building a social network here. Again, I was heartened and encouraged by the enthusiastic response I received from people, and the ease and quickness with which I made friends.

Throughout my road the trip and for the first 5 months here, I felt in the flow: I knew *exactly* what I was doing, exactly where I was going and why. My intention, my purpose, was to get to Miami to build a new life for myself here, to meet the people that I am meet here, to build the friendships and relationships that are simply waiting to come into being, and to take my career to the next level with opportunities that I felt did not necessarily exist for me in Seattle. I felt…pulled, drawn, called even to be in South Florida, not just from the perspective of the weather (which is usually my pat answer for when folks ask why I moved down here), but also from what felt like a deep soul need for change, for difference and for personal growth.

But…but. Lately, although I still feel somewhat in the flow, I sense that somewhere along the way the clarity that had not only surrounded me, but that was intricably intertwined throughout my days, that imbued every action and that held me in a loving embrace every night has somehow slipped away from me. Did I drop it? Did I loose it somewhere on the flight back from Seattle in May when I went to retrieve my items from storage? Did somehow erase it when I cleared the last set pictures from digital camera? Did get mixed with the recycling and get taken away by waste management?

Where is it? Where did it go? Because now, especially with my last trip to Boston and Seattle (from which I just returned on Monday), where I built strong connections with new people, I feel that my clarity has vanished and I can’t for the life of me quite put my finger on when I last felt it.

So, if you see my clarity anywhere, please make sure you drop it by my house. I really miss it.