Home At Last

“I feel as if I have come home, not to this place necessarily, but to myself.” This was the last line of an email to a girlfriend telling her of my time settling down here in Sighisoara. I didn’t put much thought into the words, they just flowed through my fingers to the screen as if they belonged; a seemingly simple sentence no more significant at that particular moment than recounting the marvelous strudel I had for dessert the night before. It would be two more days before I would actually, fully comprehend the significance of what I had written, of what I felt.

At the same moment I was writing that line, a reporter from the New York Times was writing me an email through the couchsurfing system. She was doing an article related to couchsurfing and wondered if I would contribute. But of course! It took us a couple days to connect between email and ornery Romanian telephones but finally Wednesday evening I settled into one of our lovely orange armchairs at the NGO for my telephone interview with Penelope Green. As it turned out, she was doing an article not on couchsurfing per se, but on the idea of what was ‘home’ for nomads like me. What was it like to give up home in the physical sense? Did we carry some sense of ‘home’ on the road and if so how? What was it like as couchsurfers (or hospitality clubbers) to surf or to host and how did hosts and surfers welcome or fit in to the home around them? And what was it like to come back to a physical place of home?

We talked, I should say I talked, for two hours as Penelope typed madly trying to catch all I had to say. I liked Penelope from hello – she has one of those bright, bold telephone personalities that immediately puts the other person on the line at ease. It was more like catching up with an old friend than doing an interview with a woman I had never met before. Now of course, anyone who knows me knows I can talk forever about anything, but she had a knack for teasing just the right tangent out of me, taking me deeper and deeper into this concept of ‘home’ and its significance to my journey these last two years.

The two hour conversation was cathartic. I sat in silence for a moment once the plastic green phone settled into the cradle. I feel like I have come home, not to this place necessarily, but to myself… I heard the soft click of the universe, the sound the sky makes when something falls into place, when a sudden realization radiates with clarity something hidden in shadows for years, perhaps a lifetime. It is what I had been searching for all along. I thought I was searching for the “place” home – for someplace where I felt like I really belonged. Or, if I never came upon such a place, as seemed more likely the case, I thought maybe I would reach a place in time when I had traveled so long that settling in a place, any place, would not leave me feeling as if I had settled for something. I had often joked that I was searching for my own back yard - I just needed to go all the way around the world to get to it because if I just walked out the back door I’d feel like I was missing something. When people asked me how long I would be a nomad, I would answer, “Until I’m so tired of traveling that all I want to do is be still.”

But how do you sit still if you aren’t comfortable in your own skin?

You don’t. You fill your life with tasks and to-do lists, bigger, better things to buy, new classes, more books, maybe take on a cause. You change cities, change jobs, change partners, create a constant sense of upheaval, of things that demand your attention. You do anything, anything to silence the ticking of the clock, because the last place you want to be is trapped alone with yourself in a room so quiet you can hear your own heart beat against the tick-tock of life passing by. This was my life ten years ago. I dare say it is the life many of us lead, especially in America.

We hide. We hide in busy-ness, in fantasy, in sex, in artificial worlds, in the legally-induced stupor created by television or alcohol or prescription drugs, or worse... And what exactly is it we are hiding from? The same thing we hid from as children. The dark. That terrible place where monsters lurk, where known things take on unknown shapes. That place where bad things happen. But this darkness is within.

We all have our own abyss, our own dark places – the untouched, unshared spaces in our soul. The places we fear to tread within ourselves, and certainly never dare show others. The monsters that live inside our thoughts, the storms that brew in our feelings, the deep, dark unexplored catacombs of our hearts, the sorrow in our souls. Our fear, our anger, our hurt, our gnawing sense of unworthiness, of purposelessness, the terrible suspicion that we are living a life that has the significance of a piece of lint on the underside of an old abandoned armchair in the forgotten corner of an unused room.

We convince ourselves it is all okay – even when we know inside it isn’t. We hold up our trophies, our diplomas, our pats-on-the-back-by-the-boss, our manicured lawns, and pretty homes, and well-behaved children. We check off our lists – good spouse (or no spouse to bother you), check; good job, check; nice car and home, check; a garden, or hobby, or something we can say feeds our soul, check. But does it really? Or is it just another check mark on the list? We look at our lists and say, “But of course I’m happy. Look, I have everything a person could want.” The echo of sardonic laughter rises from the abyss. We drink another drink, watch more TV, take on another cause, have an affair. We deafen our ears, silence our souls, and drive ever forward, never pausing to consider if we are actually on the road we want to be on, living the life we want to live; never daring to ask are we really living at all or just going through the motions.

Every man, every woman chooses to face or not to face their own abyss. The question is not whether we have one; the excavation begins the day we are born with a sudden inexplicably cruel, though arguably necessary, smack as we begin to gasp for breath, for air, for life. We are poked and prodded, yanked back and forth from the love of this beautiful woman’s arms and that familiar, soothing man’s voice to the realities of life – blood letting, circumcision, vaccinations, things done ‘for our own good.’ Necessary things perhaps – but to a new little body with no capacity to understand this concept, it is simple cruelty. The excavation continues with loving parents who mold more than see us, teachers who lecture more than tease out the natural curiosity within us, friends who betray us, lovers who leave us.

Even the luckiest person with the most loving home, friends, encouragement, confidence; even they have an abyss to face – the injustices of life that they have buried somewhere in a time when they did not have the tools to understand or deal with them. Those of us less lucky, well, we bury more. And maybe in a sense that makes luckier, because the abyss feeds itself, and the larger it becomes, the harder it is to ignore it. But until the day comes, if it comes, that day when we can no longer avoid our own pain, no longer silence our own tears, no longer pretend that a perfect life on the outside does not necessarily reflect a perfect life on the inside, we do ignore it. We do anything we can to avoid this yawning cavernous, possibly bottomless space. We skirt the edge, avert our eyes from the darkness, for to face it feels, well, terrifying. What if we lose control? What if we get lost in there? What if it simply swallows us whole? What if we just disappear? What if we die in there, in the dark, alone?

I could feel it, that place, that darkness, that yawning waiting to swallow me whole. Anger, depression, fear were feelings I rarely had, or I should say rarely acknowledged. I bounced through life with a smile, sleeping four hours a night, playing superwoman, keeping an impossible schedule; a bundle of energy that amazed everyone around me. I lived for that “How do you do it all!” exclamation. Of course you can’t, not forever. The energy runs out and you have to sit still to recharge – and there it is, the abyss, just waiting for you to sit down, to turn the lights out, waiting to call to you in the night as the clock ticks beside the bed and your heart hammers in your ears. Eventually alcohol or sleeping pills will fill in those quiet places, or you’ll just bury deeper in work, in something you can say gives you purpose. As if there is ever a purpose in hiding, except not to be found. And how do we begin to live if our purpose is not to be found?

I knew it was there, yet I avoided it, hid from it, ignored it. Anger was too risky, a floodgate that might never shut once opened. And tears, you could drown in tears. Only weak people got depressed of course and only cowards get scared. These feelings all live in those dark places; those places we are taught to avoid. But when you spend your life avoiding something it becomes the very thing you live your life around. Avoidance creates a void - and everything else centers around emptiness...

If I were to choose a metaphor looking back, I would say I was like a beautiful crystal vase – specially cut, unique, shimmering in the light, admired, a treasure, really, if you looked at it sitting there on the mantel. But the bottom was cut out and every rose placed in me died, because I quite literally couldn’t hold water. Water – the archetypal element that symbolizes feelings, emotions, the rise and fall of the tides that carry us from happiness to sorrow and back again. These things were dangerous. Logic was safe - reasonable, defendable, predictable. And rationalization? Oh glory be to the Gods, what a beautiful tool is rationalization! If you are smart enough, and I was, you can rationalize away every bad thing that ever happens to you. Your mind can anyway. But your heart? Your heart buries the pain that you never dared to feel and the abyss grows.

I was empty inside because I couldn’t hold water, wouldn’t hold the truth of my own sorrow, my own pain, my own anger, my own despair. No I wasn’t raped as a child. My father didn’t beat me and we had plenty to eat. I’m not talking about the gross injustices of the world, I’m talking about simple sorrow that is as natural a part of life as the rain. My life wasn’t a bubble-bath of rose petals, but it wasn’t a briar patch of thorns either. It was like most, a lot of good, a lot of bad….

But I bought a bill of goods that we get sold in America – that it is supposed to be all good and never bad. That if we are doing it right, it is smooth sailing, it is happily ever after, life will be a bowl of cherries, pitless cherries of course. We are taught that bad is bad, and should be ignored, pushed away, forgotten. Big boys don’t cry. Don’t let the turkeys get you down. Forward march. Think positive. Be positive and the sun will always shine on you. But the sun doesn’t always shine and if someone told you it did, you would think them a fool. So why do we believe this? Why do we believe if we just change our attitude, find the right love, design the perfect home everything will come up roses? What is so wrong, really, with one day simply being sad? No reason, just sad? Or mad? Or scared? Something in our culture tells us that is not allowed. That we’re weak if we feel. Unreliable. And so we try to prune the thorns and leave the roses, which of course is impossible, and then we wonder why there is nothing left, no roses, no thorns, nothing but these shears in our hand and this constant need to prune.

I was well pruned. I was the best at “Understanding” with a capital U; so good at not needing, at never being disappointed. Being independent I called it. Being strong. Standing on your own two feet. Don’t lean on anyone and no one will let you down. Don’t trust anyone and no one can betray you. Stay in control. Stay reasonable. Don’t feel and if you cry in the night, just don’t tell anyone. This was my life – not so different I think from the life of many these days. Silence your heart. Silence your soul. Get through the day and stay away from the abyss. But somehow I knew I was just a stub of a rose bush, just an empty, bottomless crystal vase. Some still quiet voice kept saying softly, where are your roses? You should be full of roses.

Something was wrong, something so deep I didn’t know how to define it much less get to it. But I could feel it – in what little feeling I had left, in what little intuition that could still whisper through all the deafening noise I created in an effort to silence anything that wasn’t positive, I could feel it. I was empty inside and all the accomplishments in the world, all the love in the world, all the checked off to-do lists in the world couldn’t fill the void – every moment of fulfillment died like a rose in a vase without water, leaving me empty again.

And so the universe, being the loving supportive place that it is, kindly gave me a couple of wake up calls. The first was a DUI. Thank God for that kick in the proverbial ass. My grandmother had died. It was the first time in my life I went on a drinking binge for solace - the first and the last. I truly hate to think which way my life would have led if not for that experience - funny how the worst experiences in our life are often the best. That was the first step on the path, though I didn’t know it at the time. I lay on my bed after a night in jail and consciously walked the see-saw back and forth between rationalization and responsibility. Rationalizing meant I could dismiss it, like I did everything that had a bad taste. Blame it on someone or something else. Laugh it off. Mimimize it. After all everyone gets one now a days. Responsibility meant not only taking responsibility for the action but for the feelings that came with it – the embarrassment, the shame, and, most importantly, the unacknowledged pain that I was trying to drink away in the first place - a pain that went much deeper than the death of my grandmother. If I faced that pain I knew it would be like pulling the tip of a root that you didn’t realize was connected to the acorn tree across the yard.

It would be five years before the next switching track in time. During these years I was a simmering pot - water about to boil, building heat and steam for the effort ahead, not realizing how much they would be needed. They weren’t significant years. A few loves, a few losses, but I was slowly stepping into myself. The moment I chose to take responsibility for the DUI had opened me. I was creating ground to seed. Still avoiding the abyss mind you. But a bit more aware it was there; walking occasionally to the edge, with a slight nod of acknowledgment. One day, when I’m ready. Not yet. Not now.

And then the day came. It was a brief moment - just three or four little seconds in the eternity of time. I had had a fight with the man I was seeing – in my head of course because I would never actually fight, never yell all the things I wanted to yell, never, ever, ever lose my temper or my cool. I would leave but I wouldn’t fight. You can imagine how much leaving I did in my life – if you can’t fight in love you can’t be in love. I was driving home at three in the morning on a 35mph residential street. I don’t know why the eighteen-wheeler was driving so fast. Late for his drop I guess. But there he was barreling toward me at about 70mph. It would take just a tiny movement of the wrist. No one was on the street. No one else would get hurt. The driver would be fine. His truck would crush my little convertible like a bug – he would barely even feel it. I held the steering wheel and said out loud to myself, “Sherry, it is time to either get in to this life or get out.” I couldn’t keep living searching for love I would never hold, avoiding the corners of my heart, silencing my soul, avoiding everything dark, every pain, every conflict, every disappointment; avoiding anger. Somewhere inside of me I was seething and it was eating my soul. And somewhere inside of me a little girl was weeping and she desperately needed my acknowledgement.

I think the world actually stopped. It was as if time froze, waiting for me, as I calmly considered the options. I was not suicidal. I was not depressed. It was a simple question. Do you want to live or not? If not, there is no real reason to stay. If so, well, let’s get on with it. I pulled the wheel to the right and sealed the pact with my soul. I would face my abyss. It may be big and dark and scary, but suddenly I realized there was one thing I could think of that would be worse - facing death knowing I had never really, truly lived my life.

It was five years. Five long, hard, exhausting years. Almost two thousand days of facing me, staring in the mirror, studying the face that looked back; every day, learning the contours of myself, the good, the beautiful, the strong, the dark, the bad, the terrifying, the weak. It was the hardest work I have ever done and I will not glorify it. There were far more lost moments than found, far more tears than smiles, far more sadness than joy. There were angry, bitter parts of me I had no idea existed. I shook hands with them all and to my surprise many of them waved farewell and left forever. There was more pain inside of me than I could have imagined – tears unwept for a lifetime. I cried them all. And then, do you know what? They were gone. Do you know how much less weight you have to carry through the world when you cry all the tears you never gave yourself permission to cry?

For six months every night I lit a candle and closed my eyes searching for the little girl inside of me. I let my mind wander, drawing in my imagination her world. When I first saw her she was hiding in the crawl space under a house in the country. She was scared. Scared of the dark and the spiders, But she was more scared of the open, and of me. Every night I would just sit there, by the beam in the center where it was high enough to sit without crouching. I didn’t really saying anything, didn’t demand she talk or come out. I just sat there. It was weeks before she came out of the recesses - not too close mind you – but at least out of the tiny space where the earth rose to meet the edges of the house. Sometimes we talked, often we just sat. Eventually the fear-filled tension became a companionable silence. Then one night I asked if she wanted to sit on the steps to the porch, she looked at me, scared, but nodded, yes. I thought I saw trust in her eyes. I reached for her hand and she silently slipped her tiny fingers into mine as we stepped into the open and walked to the steps. Weeks passed and sometimes we would take walks, moving further and further into the open. Sometimes we would run or skip, sometimes we talked, sometimes we just walked hand in hand in silence. It was six months before I heard her laugh. We were playing in a field – a field of flowers. That was a beautiful sight. The scared, lonely, sad little girl inside of me laughing in the sunshine. She didn’t really need much. She just needed to be acknowledged, accepted, seen. That is what we need most as children… and is what we give least as parents.

I learned a lot over those five years. I learned convincing others you are okay doesn’t mean that you are. I learned that what you feel is what you feel and it is real, whether you want to admit it or not. I learned that it is not so important what you decide as living the decision with a fullness of heart. I learned that when you avoid pain, it doesn’t go away, it hides - inside your body, inside your soul. But when you face it, when you sit right down in the middle of horrible swamp of yuck and muck and pain and sorrow, eventually, you’ve had enough. You want to go for a walk, and you do. And then you’re not in the swamp anymore.

Most importantly I learned that I was made up of darkness and light – and that the darkness was every bit as important to what makes me me as the light. Music isn’t a note playing forever. Music is the dance between notes and silence. We are the dance between light and dark – our strengths, our weaknesses, our pain, our joy. It takes all this richness to create a unique single individual.

Through this process I began to have the sneaking suspicion that the universe is after all, a supportive place. That it longs, yes longs, to cradle us, to love us, to help us. It is we who stand in the way. We run, defend, hide, protect, guard, close ourselves to our dreams, keep secret our deepest desires. All the while the universe calls to us in the soft supportive voice of a loving parent– follow your heart, I will be there to help you find your way.

The years of learning, of listening, of being with myself, all of me, the dark and the light, had quieted the chatter in my mind, erased the need to fill my seconds with busy-ness and bustle. In turn, the whisper-soft voice of intuition had become audible again. Whatever you want to call it – your higher self, your soul, God, your guardian angel, whatever, there is a wisdom in each of us, a source tapped into All That Is that can guide us and direct us, if we can slow down and quiet down enough to hear it.

I did not know why I needed to take the next step; I just knew, with a knowing too deep to question, that it was what I needed to do. I needed to take a leap of faith; faith in myself, faith in my dreams, faith in this universe. I needed to let go of everything that was comfortable on the outside and trust in what was on the inside. Josh Groban’s song from Cirque du Soleil ‘Let Me Fall’ played again and again in my mind and on my stereo – “Someone I am is waiting for courage; the one I want, the one I will become will catch me….”

I knew I couldn’t jump with a safety net; it had to be a free fall. Over the years, I had created around me all the peace and comfort I never felt inside myself in our little bungalow cottage. The living room was a cozy scene from the Thomas Kincaid paintings that decorated the walls. A white-manteled fireplace, wonderful, oak colored wood floors, a big cushiony couch and loveseat covered in the rich colors of Tuscany, set in the traditional L shape around a cherry wood and glass coffee table, a vase of flowers, pictures on the mantle, soft lighting, a rich maroon accent wall that offset the beige walls complementing the colors in the furniture. Warm, inviting, comforting, safe; a sanctuary from the world. Too safe. Too warm.

While I had confronted myself over the preceding five years, I had not challenged myself to stand as myself in the presence of others. I had not learned to know myself, where I began and ended, in relation to others. If I wanted love in my life, and I did, this was the next step. For an only child, a loner by nature, an introvert trained in the ways of an extrovert, forcing myself into the space of others to learn my contours in relation to them was a tall order. It would never work if I had a home to, well, run home to.

As warm as home was, I knew too that it was holding me back from stepping fully into myself. There were too many constructs of what I was supposed to look like, supposed to do. Images drawn by parents, by society, by expectant lovers were tucked subtly in the pictures on the wall, the books on the bookshelves, the scale under my bed, the files marked ‘failures’ in my basement.. I was stepping into the second half of my life – in both years, and, more importantly in experience. I was twenty when I became a mother. I would be almost forty when my birth-son and the youngest of the three children who had called me ‘mom’ left the proverbial nest.

The timing was perfect, as it always is at such moments in life. My oldest step-daughter was in Dallas where she had stayed after her father and I divorced. My younger step- daughter, who had moved to Charlotte to live with my son and me in 2001, had recently moved to Chicago. My son was moving to Houston. I had never known myself as an adult outside the context of being married and raising children and it was a terrifying prospect. I had a lot to learn about who I was when the day was not built around the needs of children. The circumstances had lined up. There was nothing to hold me back, nothing to keep me in Charlotte, no need to keep a home, and without a home, no need to keep a job, and without a job, all the time in the world to write. I could jump, and I did.

It is a strange, terrifying, amazing, wonderful, debilitating process that I would never wish on anyone and would wish for everyone – this “giving up” house and home. I remember the night the process began. My son put the last box in the car at three in the morning, settling our dog, Buffy, in the front seat. He hugged me goodbye, then he was gone. I didn’t even make it into the house. I crumbled right there on the driveway, crying deep soulful tears for a life I knew I was saying goodbye to forever. He resents me to this day for giving up his home. He could not understand the only real thing in that home was him. I built for him what I had never known for myself. Without him, it was nothing. I don’t think there is a silence more deafening in the world than a home no longer filled with the laughter of children and warm pitter-patter of a pup’s feet on wood floors. I would have died in that silence. Nothing, nothing would ever be the same, and there was no point in pretending it could be.

I don’t know how long I lay there – I could feel nothing but the pain inside, pain I had spent five long years learning how to feel. I cried until there were no more tears, sat up to see the sun breaking across the horizon, brushed myself off, walked into the house, and began.

For the next four weeks I cried and laughed, mourned, raised my fists to the heavens, danced, smashed things to smithereens, and sang as I sifted and sorted through everything tangible in my life. I picked up everything I owned, held it in my hands, and asked myself: “Why do you have this?” Does it empower you or pull you down? Does it belong to an identity that parents or society or time has put on your shoulders or is it part of your essence, your very being? Is it practical? Replaceable? Necessary? What will it mean if you let it go? Why should you keep it?

I was the phoenix preparing the fire, quite literally. The most amazing discovery was just how many things I kept to remind me of failures, shortcomings, hurts, and losses. I had cried these tears. It was now time to burn the things that continued to chain me to the pain. A veritable bonfire grew on the living room floor. It took six hours to burn it all, feeding it piece by piece into the fireplace. Albinoni’s Adagio in G Minor played on repeat as the fire blazed, reflecting its light on the warm wood floors. I purged my self, my soul, releasing resentment to create room for acceptance, releasing pain to allow room for joy, releasing hate so that I could love more freely. When the pile was at last gone, I threw the clothes I was wearing onto the flames, and, standing naked in the glow of the firelight, declared myself reborn.

That weekend I had a “Please come take my stuff!” party, the next a garage sale, and the last a charity pick up. At the end all that remained were a dozen or so boxes of books, half a dozen boxes of photo albums and memorabilia, the Thomas Kincaid paintings I would one day hand down to my children, a couple boxes of cherished things - my great grandmother’s ceramics, special gifts from the years, things precious to my very soul, and some clothes. I had distilled myself, boiled my material world down to the essence of me - left no trappings to define me except what was core – my love of books, of family, and my memories.

I was cleansed, free of everything that had held me down. Free to find who I was from the inside out rather than the outside in. I had a plane ticket to Italy, a dream to write, a few thousand dollars, and the most important thing, faith, in myself, in my path, in the world.

I spent two years as a nomad - six months in Italy, four in New York, months upon months in the homes of strangers who became friends. Traveling by train, by bus, by car, by foot. Waking up everyday to myself, not as a mother or a wife or an attorney or an employee, just myself, as me. Wide-eyed and curious in a new world, learning every second - new languages, new cultures, and this person called me. Embracing my dream, valuing myself, reaching for life. Reaching…. Living…. Really, really living.

I learned in the end that really living doesn’t mean happily ever after, it means simply being real. When I laugh, I really laugh and when I cry, I really cry. I don’t avoid the tears and I don’t force the laughter. I think back to the superwoman days all those years ago. To anyone looking from the outside in, I was happier then, I smiled more, cried less, laughed a lot, sometimes I honestly miss the pretended perfection. In many ways, life then was easier. But life now is real. I feel real.

The garden of my soul, the beautiful cut vase on the mantel are filled with roses now, as that voice whispered they should be all those years ago. Yes I cut my fingers when I tend them, and I bleed, and I cry, and in the blood and the tears I know I am alive. And then I smell their beautiful scent, see their rich and varied colors, and I know too that I am blessed to be alive. And then my lover takes one and brushes it against my face, looking at me through eyes that see the soul I came to know and am not afraid to share with him and I know I am truly loved, loved as much for those dark places as for my light. I have learned the contours of my soul. It has become familiar to me, like a favorite armchair shaped to your body through years of cradling you.

Shortly after I left house and home behind, I wrote an email to friends asking “What is Home?” The compilation of responses came to this:

Home is a place where you do not have to pretend; where you can lay aside the armor you face the world with and rest. It is the place where you are comfortable, at ease, relaxed. A place that is safe and warm and filled with tenderness. Where you love and are loved. Where even the darkest corners do not scare you because you know every inch like the back of your hand. Home is something known, trusted, real, familiar, safe. It is the place where you are at peace.

“I feel as if I have come home, not to this place necessarily, but to myself.” The import of the words now were clear - I had indeed, at long last, come home.

Comments

[Jean-Claude]

Je n'ai pas compris votre texte dans le détail, mais je pense en avoir saisi le sens.

Nous sommes faits d'ombre et de lumière, cela est certain, merci de l'avoir si bien exprimé, et il nous faut parfois parcourir un long et douloureux chemin avant d'arriver "chez nous".

Merci encore pour votre témoignage, vous êtes réellement une belle personne.

Jean-Claude

[Karin]

Dearest Sherry,

thank you for those wonderful words I read only today...
So much you are telling about could be me as well, though I am already pealing the busy-ness away, writing less lists, and sitting still ever more often... Still, becoming me seems yet impossible, children, work, expectancies of others still holding me back, but I am confident my time will come, as it did for you. As the moment you walked through my door in Salzburg was a white little cobble on the path of/for soulfoul light.
Thank you, Sherry.
Love,
Karin

[W.P.H.]

Great job.

It's really good to have you HOME.

Love Dad

[steff]

Sherry,
I could sum up my feelings while reading this text in just one word : WOAWWWWW!
It touched me very deep within and what you relate is indeed universal, or at least it resonates in me and with some moments and events in my own life...
Life feels to me as a huge theater stage where we all wear masks and costumes to fit better into society, to meet family and friends expectations, to hide our wounds and failures. At times we drop them, most of the time we are way too frightened to.
I feel very joyful that you found this peace and self acceptance of the beautiful soul you hold within :) If I can pray for one thing tonite, it is that future allows me to grow old in such a beautiful and accomplished way and that I can stay just as faithful and honest to myself. Life is not an easy journey, but it is in those contrasts between good and bad moments, between pains and joys, beauty and ugliness, achievements and failures that it takes all its density and depth.
A hug dear!
Stephanie

[Shellen Lubin]

Absolutely beautiful, Sherry. There is no end to the adventure--the challenge or the discovery. I love you.

[Rebecca Ashley]

Sherry, I want to manifest you right beside me, or me to you up by the citadel. Instead I can send some kindness and love through the ether. I will carry these words with me always; I have rarely read anything so honest and true. The photo of Hans and you in the NY Times article is beautiful; another chapter, but surely not the 'end' to your surfing travels as the caption might suggest...

[Julie O'Dell Burgaletta]

Sherry-

This was by far your BEST, most honest writing to date. The depth of your personal search is clearly evident as you have now evolved to place where you are truly "home". Reflecting on all your life experiences ("aha" moments; good and bad) armed with your computer, vivid memories and new experiences (especially now with Hans) will allow you to write a most wonderful 2nd book from your newly evolved personal perspective...which by the way, I see Book 2 woven from your "motherhood" past.

I remember when we first met, you defied all the conventional rules...You were a divorced mother with a gorgeous little boy attending law school full-time AND on Law Review....Any ONE of these ventures is enough for one person but no, Sherry doesn't do anything half-way...You excelled through your own desire to succeed...The day of reckoning though came when you looked deep within. Kudos to having the strength to find the answers that many folks never have the courage to understand.

I speak from experience; The state where you are now is where I was after I sorted out for me, "Who's your Daddy". It takes incredible strength and determination. This "newly evolved Sherry" will astound you! Take comfort in all of the tears and layers of skin that you have peeled off your body and soul as you unravel the mysteries of life and the universe.

Back in the day, I saw your eyes twinkle (not from tears, but instead challenged enthusiasm) as you faced every day...it was this twinkle that you have found once again...never let it go...challenge yourself!!! Get BOOK 1 out the door so that your new experiences will bring you Book 2! Go get 'em!!!!

Let me know how I can help!!!