Three weeks ago, I moved from Hunters Road. I lived there for a year and a half between my married years and now. And it was the adventure of a lifetime.
Hunters Road is in Rappahannock County, Virginia, seated near the rise of the Shenandoah National Forest at the foot of the Blue Ridge Mountains.
Not only is it exquisitely beautiful, but it is radically isolated. For me, anyway. I love silence and I thrive on creating in quiet. But this was a whole new level of stillness.
No cell service, no TV, no news unless I drove into town. I had a dish and just enough gigabytes per month to post to Every Day Spirit and do my app updates. No clicking on videos or opening pages with spinning ads. No surfing my Facebook feed. Definitely no streaming.
Most days, the only sounds I heard came from nature, the thoughts in my head and the beating of my heart.
I meditated and did yoga daily. I walked. I worked on Every Day Spirit. And I wrote.
Each morning I sat at a wall of windows in my rented cabin watching every little movement of nature, listening to my heart. I listened to what the pain and joy were telling me. I listened for Spirit and the inner voice of guidance. I made friends with horses, cows, a skunk, a snake, wasps, frogs, bugs and birds. And every day I wrote a story.
With you. I wrote with a connection to you. There was an underlying sense that if I could see my way through the fog of loss and change, disappointment and fragility, all of us could.
I wanted to be able to tell you and my daughter Maya what I had learned. I wanted to report back from the void that gratitude was actually possible in the midst of confusion. I wanted to prove that all was well even when all seemed decidedly not well. I wanted to be a Walden experiment, an adventure into the wilderness of raw Spirit.
I wanted to find beauty in small things when I couldn't find it in big things.
I did not worry about what the writings would become. I just knew I needed to write every single day by the wall of windows, gazing out on hallowed ground.
I knew this was why I was on Hunters Road.
I’m private by nature. It’s outside of my comfort zone to share my personal story, but I do this because after all, you were there with me. We made this journey together. I talked to you the whole time.
And I learned that perhaps Hunters Road is not a place, but a state of the heart.
Maybe Hunters Road is where gratitude heals things, where joy grows out of self-love and simple things, where the peace of our spiritual nature is part of our every thought and action, where hope rises like the sun.
Next week I’ll be starting the new blog, “Tales From Hunters Road” on Monday mornings at 10. Begin each week with some sun for your soul. See you there. xo Mary
