This story begins before I know there’s going to be a story. Which makes it difficult to know where, when, or how to begin. I could say: with a separation. But my wife and I were already a year or two into what our therapist kept trying to call a “therapeutic separation.” He’s a good man who truly gave us his best shot. So, what sounds more accurate is: this story begins with an ending. Or, even better might be: the awful begin-ning of a painful ending.
The Fallen Autumn—Book 2 in the series of The Birth of a Vagabond—follows up on the shatter and bottoming-out of the trials and errors portrayed in The Broken Summer with a journey that begins with bare feet and moonbeams down in the American Heartland, but soon heads over and up to the Pacific coastline, rivers, and small mountain towns of Oregon—and then back again to the southern reaches of the Great Plains.
Here, the vagabond’s odyssey takes a gradual turn into the bittersweetness of the holiday season—as well as the early stages of a good father’s rapid decline—as the astronomical year winds down to its longest night. Yet another beginning to a couple of looming endings. Endings that will have to find their way through to another beginning of a new year.
The Hidden Winter—Book 3 in the series of The Birth of a Vagabond—ushers in the Christmas holiday, then takes us into a New Year…one that begins with the death of a good father. So this winter will be one of quiet introspection and pulling back and inward. Or, in poetic terms: kiva time.
The season culminates, though, in a journey out to the West Coast, and a drive up the legendary Pacific Coast Highway, as it passes through famous towns, like San Luis Obispo, Carmel, and Napa.
But, the equinox greets the vagabond with a very emotional and powerfully revelational moment among the great redwoods of Northern California. A spiritual launch into the Risen Spring.
As this year-long odyssey passes through its fourth and final season—from the coast of Oregon to Key West…and from there to Quebec—I now must wrestle, full on and finally, with the big questions of healing, transformation, and moving on. And the answers, if there are any, come—though very slowly…and only as whispers—from the stones, the mountains, the oceans and the deserts. But also along thousands of miles of backroads and blue highways.
There’s more than one encounter with some past “place where it all began.” Reckonings and goodbyes abound. And so, in The Risen Spring, I must come to grips with one unavoidable truth in particular: Healing is a path that we follow for the rest of our lives. Yes, a vagabond is certainly born. And there will be no going back—to anywhere,
or anything, that used to be.
