I've been invited to attend a ceremony at which we are expected to dress as though we came from somewhere.

To wear clothing with a story. Not from the mall. Or the internet. Or a sweatshop. From the hands of a people whose handwork keeps them tethered to those who came before them. 

Stephen Jenkinson has defined craft as "where everything you know can appear in the world."

I make virtually nothing with my hands. The calligraphy skills I began to develop in college have atrophied as I've typed on tinier and tinier keypads. I was too impatient and distracted as a kid to learn the sewing, gardening, and home repair skills of my mother. She, before me, was shamed by wearing the clothes hand-sewn by her immigrant mother, especially when she arrived at an elite college where her classmates referred to their outfits by name (I think I'll wear my Christian Dior tonight).

I spent some time bewildered by this question of what to wear, bereaved by my own disassociation with the handwork of my ancestors. My mother wondered if some shreds remained in our family of a traditional Waldensian costume - the clothes worn for centuries by the Pre-Reformation Protestant sect of Italians from whom we descend. I wrote last year about my attempts to follow a trail of bread crumbs back to some connection with the people and the place left behind when my grandparents immigrated to America on the eve of WWII.

No such remnants surfaced but an internet search brought me to a bilingual blog on Waldensian culture that mentioned a seamstress located on a tiny square in a Northern Italian town, a square named in memory of my grandfather's brother, Willy Jervis, executed by the retreating Nazis for his work in the resistance. I found an Italian cousin willing to seek out this craftswoman to obtain a hand-made shawl for me.

The needlework is exquisite, you can scarcely tell the front from the back. I recognize the flowers from our two weeks in those high mountain valleys last May. The fringe is hand-knotted - how many hours of work?

This project of what to wear led me to a local designer and dressmaker here in Portland for something befitting the shawl. It led me to the depths of my linen closet for the tablecloths and napkins hand-embroidered by my great and great-great grandmothers, to study their craft and imagine what my own hands might make. And it inspired another of my American cousins to search out a Waldensian shawl for his teenaged daughter, that she might know something more of the story of our people.

The last time I visited L'Envers, our ancestral farm on the shady side of the Val Pellice in Italy's Piedmont, the arbor was covered with kiwi vines. I was 25 years old. That was my first - and until now, only - visit since toddlerhood. 

In the first three years of my life, we lived on an air force base in France, affording multiple opportunities to join my mother's family across the Alps beneath the "treille" (French for trellis) draped with grape vines. 

My mother first brought me to L'Envers as a baby, not yet one year old. Chubby and tan and mobile, unlike the Italian bambini kept swaddled on a diet of baked flour paste, I earned the nickname "raggio di sole" (sunbeam) from my mother's granny. 

This month Amber and I joined my mother and her sister for an extended stay at L'Envers. I'm calling it "The Glorious Return," a bit tongue in cheek, after the legendary mountain crossing of our Pre-Reformation Protestant ancestors to these high alpine valleys from which they'd been driven. (Read my earlier blog post for this historic family back story.) 

Below, photos from the last time we were all together around the stone table under the trellis: my mom Jane holding me, next to her grandmother Mary Bellini Roland, my grandmother Helen Jervis holding my infant sister Cindy, my aunt Madeline holding my cousin Mary. In the next photo we toddlers have been released, and on the right, more of the family. In the next row, me and Mary on our mother's laps at the newly opened Dulles airport awaiting our flight to France; Mary and me toddling in front of the wood shed in L'Envers two years later; the same ladders in the loft of the refurbished shed today.

For my mother and aunt, too, it's been an historic return. They lived at L'Envers for a third of 1947 when they were 9 and 10 years old. As soon as civilian flights started up following the war, my Nonna decided it was time to introduce her American children to her Italian family (she and my Nonno had immigrated to the US on the eve of WWII). The night they arrived in Torre Pellice they were at the center of a huge family dinner at the town house on the Piazza Liberta (where I later stayed 41 years later as a 25 year-old traveling with my Nonna, and where we had dinner with cousins last week, after another 27 years elapsed). Walking around town as a child, my mother reports, "I had the extraordinary experience of frequently being recognized by strangers on the street as 'la ragazza Americana di Elena e Ernesto.'  It suddenly felt as if I had a home town!

"To get to L’Envers, the family 'house in the country,'" my mother continues, "we had to walk through town, past the Waldensian cemetery, across the Pellice River on a bridge, then along a dirt road up the shady side of the valley. Approaching the house from the footpath, we crossed a meadow and saw it from below, a wide two-story house with large shuttered windows on the upper floor. Below the house was a large vegetable garden fenced with crossed sticks. The lower floor had a number of storage rooms, root cellars and the like. A steep climb at the right end of the house brought us to the upper level, with the front door to the house at our left, a grape arbor with a stone table and benches to the right, a large courtyard behind the house, and a two-story barn across the courtyard from the grape arbor. The far end of the main building, attached to the family house, was the house of the tenant farmer and his family. In 1947 there was still a lot of war damage visible in the house and in the vicinity."

My mom's memoir of their four months at L'Envers as children is a fantastic read. Since then, both she and Madeline have returned a number of times, but never as residents. L'Envers has passed through the male heirs in the family; the town house on the Piazza Liberta, to the females. Visits have been limited to a few hours, a glass of wine or a meal under the arbor. This year we had the great good fortune to be invited by our cousin Dan who is restoring the place (grapes back on the trellis, among many other improvements) to have it to ourselves, three weeks in all for my mom and aunt.

Irreverence aside, the return has been glorious indeed. I've documented its spectacular beauty and our various adventures on my Facebook page. Most important for me, though, has been the chance to inhabit the same rooms, roam the same hillsides under the same ancient chestnut trees, be dazzled by the same mountain peaks as generation upon generation of my matrilineal ancestors. To feel, in some ways as my mother did in 1947 - despite not speaking the language and barely knowing a soul - "as if I had a home town".

Upper left: my Nonna Elena Roland in large white collar with her brother Paulo to the left (killed by a sniper just after the war), and sister Anna on the far right holding baby brother Alberto, who also immigrated to the US; his son Dan is now the master of the house. Upper middle: My Nonno Ernesto Jervis. Upper right: my newlywed grandparents shortly before emigrating. Lower left: My Nonna, my mother, and me in the mountains above L'Envers in 1964. Lower right: The Glorious Return, Madeline and Jane in 2015.

So to honor her Mom's wanderlust, Caity tenderly packaged some of her ashes in a beautiful little urn and enlisted friends across the country to host her. 

"A grand trip with loved ones who are sharing adventures with her." Thus far she's hung out in the Bay Area before joining us here in Oregon. She accompanied me to the Ottawa Valley, via Toronto, and will soon board an early morning flight to the mountains of northwest Italy. She'll spend some time in New York City before being reunited with her daughter at the 40th anniversary Michigan Womyn's Music Festival.

"I know she is loving this," Caity says. "I am too. Here's to you Mione, you made the world a better place."

Read about how I took my Dad along for the ride when I ventured to Bhutan, and last year's post on an annual Motherless Mother's Day commemoration.

Sitting down to write this week's blog post, I was reminded of my very first, back in September, 2012. I had just returned from a glorious 50 mile backpacking trip around Oregon's Three Sisters. The photo didn't do justice to the Wizard-of-Oz-poppy-field effect of the blankets of perfumed lupine we'd traversed.

I remember on that trip being filled with wonder at the stupendous natural world in which I'm lucky enough to live. And equally filled with wonder at the work I get to do. I had just completed my first year of work as a Life-Cycle Celebrant and my time on the trail had me savoring the extraordinary privilege of accompanying families and communities through life's most sacred passages.

That Three Sisters trip was in the company of old college friends, Richard and Colleen, along with their daughter Andrea and her fiance Chase. I'd attended Rich and Colleen's wedding in Yosemite Valley 30 years ago, and Andrea had accompanied her brothers and parents to the White Salmon ceremony Amber and I created for our relationship. And so it created something of a magical circle that Annie and Chase booked me to officiate their wedding on that trip.

That sense of magic, of unexpected encounters with what can only be called the Divine, of experiencing life as sacred - coming from my most rational of upbringings, where every dinnertime conversation was fact-checked by the nearby Encyclopedia Britannica - my growing relationship with the unseen world is a welcome revelation.

Rich and Colleen and Amber and I embarked on another 50-miler earlier this month, to the high country of Yosemite. We took in the big splendors, of course, from the six high mountain passes we topped (three over 10,000 feet). But we also marveled at the little things. 

The stone triangle inside a square inside a circle hidden in a grove of ancient trees on a rock ledge in a campsite we'd been tempted to bypass on our last night.

The string of five pack horses who were inexplicably roaming free through the meadows surrounding unnamed lakes above 9,000 feet, no wrangler in sight (we found an abandoned halter on the trail a few miles below the next day).

The rise of the supermoon over lakes awash in reflected alpenglow. A baptismal dip into those same sun-warmed lakes. The heartbeat of life everywhere.

With every step, the anxieties of daily life felt more remote. The wonder of it all, thump-thumping in my chest. 

I returned to a week in which I helped two families say farewell to their beloved dead, supported an extraordinary young woman in preparing for her own death, and celebrated the impending changes in a family about to welcome a new child. The wonder of it all, thump-thumping in my chest. 

To prepare for our first session at Stephen Jenkinson's Orphan Wisdom School, my class of scholars - as he calls us - was asked to reflect on the name bestowed upon our cohort: People of Mountain Longing. 

“Longing has the flavor of grief,” Jenkinson said at the workshop I attended at Marylhurst last Fall. To me, longing feels ancestral, something bequeathed to us, an embodied response to the full-hearted, broken-hearted condition of being alive. Paired with mountains – which cultures throughout time have seen as the meeting place of Earth and the heavens, a place where humans can communicate with their gods – mountain longing carries a sense of spiritual quest. At the same time, mountain conjures a physicality, a one-foot-in-front-of-the-other challenge, plodding at times but with the promise of elevation, freedom.

I don't yet know why this name was chosen for us. Perhaps it references the experience of those who came before us to this place in eastern Ontario: the Algonquin of Pikwàkanagàn First Nation. Their name means "[beautiful] hilly country [covered] in evergreens". According to their web site, archaeological evidence indicates Algonquins occupied the Ottawa Valley for at least the last 10,000 years. Stripped of every imaginable freedom to practice their culture, speak their language, and traverse the land upon which they had subsisted for those 10,000 years, a deep legacy of longing must permeate the community to which I prepare to travel. 

These speculations stirred reflections of my own, about my experience of mountains, of the people in my immediate lineage, or the loss and longing I carry.

When I had the chance to choose a college, I picked one by a mountain, in Portland, Oregon – an hour from Mount Hood, an hour from the Pacific Ocean, a city dotted with extinct volcanoes. I had grown up in the harbor towns of New Haven and Honolulu. My mother saw to it that we camped in the mountains during our early years. Weekends during summer visitation in Hawaii, once my father had moved there with his girlfriend, included a hike in the mountains as often as a trip to a beach park. Reed College, besides being halfway between my two sets of parents (and 3,000 miles away from each), featured a freshman orientation backpacking trip on Mount Jefferson. Eager for a life unpopulated by my prep school classmates (not a single Hopkins graduate had ever enrolled at Reed) I knew who I wanted to claim as my people: backpackers. For my high school graduation my mother gifted me a frame pack and sleeping bag; my father, hiking boots. I spent that summer climbing the 29 flights of steps to my father’s Waikiki condo, the pack stuffed with laundry.

That first backpack trip confirmed my nascent longing for time in the mountains. Last year I took six backpacking trips into the Catalina Mountains of Southern Arizona and the Olympics and Cascades of the Pacific Northwest. This year I’ve been out twice; just this last weekend, a pilgrimage to the Chiracahua Mountains where the US Cavalry struggled for years to defeat the Apache.

More than anyone, my Nonna, my mother’s mother, put mountain longing in me.  She grew up in the Italian Piedmont, a region surrounded on three sides by the Alps. A tiny clan of Pre-Reformation Protestants whose cultural survival depended on the sanctuary of high places after being declared heretics by the Roman Catholic Church, the Waldensians arrived in Torre Pellice, what would become her hometown, in the early 13th century. Immense Roland family pride links us to Waldensian hero Henri Arnaud who led “the Glorious Return” to the valleys in 1689, in which two-thirds of a 1,000-strong band of exiles perished; the remaining 300 escaped slaughter by 4,000 amassed French troops under cover of a storm and, before the army could catch up with them, a change in political alliances. 

On my Nonno’s side, the Jervis family hadn’t been Italian for long. Immense family pride connects us to the British Admiral John Jervis, who imposed limes on the Navy, thereby curing scurvy and allowing Britain to rule the world’s seas. By the mid-nineteenth century with much of the family off colonizing India, teenaged Annie fell under the spell of the Garibaldi Freedom Fighters who were in England raising funds from the anti-Papist well-to-do for their Italian unification campaign. She ran off with one of them to Italy; the family jewels came too. The Freedom Fighter took the jewels and gave her syphilis in return. (My grandfather carried a childhood memory of visiting this blinded aunt in a ruined palazzo in Naples.) Her brother, my great-great-grandfather, sent to fetch her back, stayed to tend to the Garibaldi wounded and married a Waldensian woman.

Elena Roland and Ernesto Jervis conducted their courtship in the mountains, where their adolescent Waldensian group spent every opportunity outdoors, picnicking, climbing, hiking up with skiis on their backs and gliding down. The Jervis brothers embodied athleticism, adventure, escape from my grandmother’s strict Victorian father. Years later, she recounted these glory days on Mount Granero to me in great detail; she gave me her cool woolen ski pants which I wore to shreds in my twenties. 

When Mussolini declared Catholicism the official state religion and membership in the Fascist party was required for my grandfather to work as an engineer, they immigrated to the United States. I never heard Nonna express any yearning for the country of her birth – only those mountains. The mountain cost my Nonno's brother Willy his life: executed in the town square for aiding the Resistance with his mountaineering skills, a mountain refuge now bears his name. 

My Nonna embraced America wholeheartedly: a Protestant country, Roosevelt, the freedoms despite wartime restrictions and their limited finances, and – the mountains. They lived in eastern cities but she loved the Mountain West. When she visited me in Oregon she instructed me in how to walk down a steep grade – “You see, you place your foot like this” horizontally, across the mountain, “and now like this.” An adult backpacker by then, I humored her, not yet appreciating that even though I thought I didn’t need to learn this lesson, she had a strong need to impart it. 

When my Nonno died after ten years of cardiac and cognitive decline, I met Nonna back in Torre Pellice, her first return to her native land without her beloved husband and my first adult encounter with this ancestral place. We had planned for me to help her up to Mount Granero to spread his ashes. Before I arrived she got spooked about the legalities of transporting his remains. I found that she had already quietly mixed the ashes in with the soil of his mother’s grave while planting fresh begonias on it.

Of my father’s people, we know nothing beyond the assurance from his politically conservative, Southern Baptist sister that, “We’ve always been Americans” – but assuredly not “Native”. 

While there is much I don’t know about my people, I do know that I come from generation upon generation of emigrants. From the Waldensians fleeing persecution over high mountain passes to my maternal grandparents leaving Italy and never looking back; from my father leaving Charlotte, North Carolina to attend Andover and Harvard and never going back (his father was the traffic manager for a cotton broker and his mother cashiered at the A&P; their first car was a used one they bought to drive North to witness his graduation); to his moving from Connecticut to Hawaii six days after my parents’ divorce, and never coming back; to my own definitive departure from my mother’s home to the opposite coast at the age of 17.

“Longing is choosing,” I heard Jenkinson say last Fall. “Grief is the midwife that turns desire into longing.” In my 51 years I have known much of desire, and, increasingly, something of longing. I have some experience of grief, but more, a sense of carrying the grief of generations in my family, mute and inaccessible without the skills I seek to learn; of being surrounded by the unacknowledged grief of my culture, so desperately in need of the skills I long to embody and leave behind.

The new year found me sitting in a circle around a firepit in Tucson where the good souls gathered had cast into the flames what they sought to shed from 2013, and tucked into their pockets what they wished to beckon in 2014. A scrap of conversation with the person next to me captured exactly what I cherish most these days…

Four principles, a four-fold path (in the parlance of the improvisational movement practice we were discussing): Show up. Pay attention. Tell the truth. Be open to what happens next.

My work as a Life-Cycle Celebrant brings me into daily contact with people doing just that, whether creating ceremonies to mark major life passages, observing simple daily rituals, or gathering for intimate encounters at a Death Café. That’s why I concluded, reflecting on my time in Bhutan, that one need not travel to the other side of the globe to find stewards of the sacred in abundance.

In tribute to everyone who is showing up, paying attention, telling the truth, and being open to what happens next, here is my list of 20+13 occasions for gratitude from the year just past.

1.  Writing: I set out to write 50 stories in 50 weeks on my blog and it not only got me writing, it got me thinking like a writer and reconnected to other writers. Best part: paying more attention to the stories that surround me (see below).

2.  Readers: Every post brings the joy of responses, a cascade of stories flowing from other stories. And who doesn't appreciate praise like this? “Holly’s newsletter is like a clear voice coming through the fog reminding me to be present to life.” Wow!

3.  Published: The lovely journal Cactus Heart published my essay: My Friend Marcy Has Cancer. I Don't (Yet). which I was inspired to revive through my immersion in the Death Cafe movement.

4. Witness: Marcy Westerling, friend of 20+ years, lets me look over her shoulder at her Livingly Dying. I am continuously humbled.

5.  Nature: Six backpacking trips, all but one with actual backpacks and two weeks living outdoors in the Michigan woods reinforced that sense of wonder that’s harder to feel within four walls.

6. Mother: Our adult relationship transcends the involuntary bonds of biology. She did not choose to get pregnant with me any more than I chose her as my mother. But we choose each other now. Two glimpses: It Takes a Neighborhood, A Tree for the Ages.

7. Father: If he’d had a funeral, I might not be on my current path. I commemorated the 12th anniversary of Ken Pruett’s death by commissioning Holly Swan of Ash & Earth to make a memorial stone I can hold in my palm or wear around my neck. And I wrote a trilogy of posts about my path to forgiveness: Letting Go of My Dad Part 1 & Part 2.   

8. Kids: A week without my playdate with these darling darlings is a less joyous week, indeed. 

9. Amber: It’s been 12 years since Amber and I declared our commitment in front of our nearest and dearest and we’re still thankful for each other every day. 

10. Weddings: I had the opportunity to co-create and officiate some lovely weddings this year, and to muse about the meaning of it all.  

11. Funerals: I had the unparalleled honor of assisting with 8 brave and beautiful tributes this year, including one that was 19 years overdue.  

12. Death Cafés: I cofounded the PDX Death Café and witnessed the courage of hundreds of participants. Kate Brassington, one of my fabulous collaborators, explains “Why I talk about death”. 

13. Teachers, formal: I trained with the magnificent JerriGrace Lyons of Final Passages, one of the mothers of the death midwife movement, and was certified as a Home Funeral Guide. I dipped my toe into the deep waters of Stephen Jenkinson’s Orphan Wisdom and will travel to his school in eastern Canada for more in 2014.

14. Teachers, informal: Before she died, the utterly irreplaceable Val Garrison said this, “There is no magical group of perfect friends who will never disappoint you. Embrace the imperfect family.”

16. Students: The Unitarian Church invited me to teach a three-week course in Creative Rituals for a Changing World. Such a wonderful group to explore together the cairns that mark the path behind us and the way ahead. 

17. The unknown: Three cheers to my clients who embraced liminality – that in-between state of becoming. And to those who stepped forward from divorce, finding ways to release, in John O’Donohue’s words, all that is unforgiven.

18. Remembering: So many ways, from simple to elaborate, to caress the echo… as long as I live, you too shall live. 

19. Colleagues: I’m finding my new tribe. As much as I’ve thrived for years in a community of political activists, these days I’m finding my place among the healers and meaning-makers, the revivers of lost arts and architects of new ways to walk through old portals, as Andrea Carlisle artfully observed. 

20. Serendipity: And through it all – the showing up, paying attention, and truth telling – the biggest gift of all has been the mystery of what happens next, something unearned, without guarantee… experiences and outcomes that cannot be willed but arrive on the wings of grace and gratitude. 

+ 13 of my favorite stories from the year:

1. The dutch oven that brings Peggy Acott’s mother back to her. 
2. Monica Wesolowska’s important and achingly honest memoir of surviving her infant son’s death. 
3. Best use of blow torch: healing from divorce. 
4. The circle of love created by Kristel and Trevor’s family.
5. The memorial quilt crafted by Becky Bent that finally found its home. 
6. Dannielle Yates’ use of sound to clear the air, literally. 
7. The community-building celebrations of Liz & Pat’s 25 years together and Holly Blue’s wedding. 
8. The gratitude ceremony Emily created to celebrate the community around her gender-affirming surgery. 
9. Lara Vesta’s story of a woman who found her own name.  
10. Charlotte Eulette’s story of a celebration of life that was 8 years in the making, which led to Kathy’s 18-years-delayed ceremony for her mom. 
11. Alethea Devi’s further proof that there are many ways to sanctify a relationship. 
12. The cosmic baton pass from Stephanie’s deceased dad to Jay during their wedding.
13. Andrea Carlisle’s eulogies for her brilliant dog Brio and heroic cat Hadley Mae. 
    

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With thanks to tc colbert for the four-pillar inspiration.

I tried greeting him: "Kuzu zangpo la!" The toothless old man, draped in layers of scraggledy cloth, registered no response. Despite his deafness, he carried on at great length with our guide, who translated once the grizzled fellow had shuffled on down the path. The man had been at a high mountain hermitage, where he'd gone to perform 100,000 prostrations. In the midst of this prayerful exercise, he'd become ill and was now walking himself down to a hospital.

We'd seen many prostrations already, in our ten days in Bhutan. Even our guide, who professed not to be religious, observed the ritual upon entering every temple. These prostrations commit the entire body, hands cupped together above the head, traveling to the forehead, to the mouth and heart, and then to the ground as the body follows from standing to kneeling to fully bowed. The former semi-pro athlete in our group likened them to burpees.

The number of intended prostrations impressed us (as did the fact of this fellow serving as his own ambulance). But by this point in our trip, we weren't surprised by the every day acts of devotion that seemingly accompanied our every step. 

This particular encounter was on a trek to a yak pasture at 12,000 feet where we would sleep at the base of a monastery tended by a single monk and his cat. His daily prayers included a smoke blessing to keep the mountains clear for trekkers. Of greater importance were the other acts of intention that kept this remote hillside perch, funded by the government and staffed by monks on three-month tours of duty, available for pilgrims year-round. 

Besides supporting over 40 major monasteries and countless tiny outposts, the Bhutanese government acts as steward of the sacred by promoting, even requiring, active preservation of their culture. Cameras are not allowed in temples; what's within is to be experienced, not commodified. National dress and traditional architecture evoke a clear sense of belonging, of place, of connection to community in present time and through the ages.

It's not Shangri-La, of course. There are problems, contradictions, restless youth. But that sense of the sacred in Bhutan is palpable, able to be touched and felt. The prayer wheels on every stream of water; the 108 white funeral flags planted for every death; the tiny handmade stupas made of cremated beloveds, tucked into every cranny; the colorful karma-boosting prayer flags flapping everywhere the breeze will catch them. Those engaged in these practices might not be religious; observance may be spiritual, philosophical, superstitious, cultural, habitual. I'm not sure the distinctions matter when considering what's clearly a way of life.

It would be easy to disparage our own Western culture, by contrast, as hostile to the sacred, devoid of much collective connection to devotion or the divine. What strikes me most, though, as I reflect on my three weeks in Bhutan and Thailand at the tail end of 2013, is how many Americans I know who act as stewards of the sacred. 

In my next post I'll tell you more about what I've discovered locally on my homegrown pilgrimage to find and create more meaning, more connection, near and far. 

Long ago, my favorite therapist said to me, "How would you feel if you knew you weren't my favorite client?" 

This question about my place in the world came to mind over the past week as I grappled with how to share the immensity of my 12 days in Bhutan.

It took more than 24 hours via jet plane transversing 15 time zones to get there. And yet Wifi, where it worked, connected me in an instant with Facebook followers everywhere.

A sturdy pack of us trekked to a yak pasture at 12,000 feet where we slept lower than the caretaker monk (solitary, except for his cat) in the monastery built into the cliff above us. If we could have transported ourselves in a line through the sky around the globe to our side of the world, we would have been suspended higher than the highest point in our home state of Oregon.

In every ancient high-altitude valley we visited the dzong, thriving medieval fortresses that house the secular and religious seats of power for the surrounding district, and have for over 500 years. 

This land-locked Himalayan nation (surrounded by India and Tibet, aka China) with fewer citizens than our smallish American city (counting the suburbs around the people's Republic of Portlandia), has one of the planet's newest democracies (the king insisted on it in 2007 in what's referred to as "a gift from the golden throne"), and the world's fourth fastest growing economy (thanks to hydropower sales to India). They maintain tight controls on tourism to maximize the benefit and minimize the impact of those curious to see Gross National Happiness in action. 

We wondered, and worried, about whether our presence would harm our host country. Being granted an audience with the country's new Prime Minister invited delusions of grandeur. He teased the members of our small American foundation that our personal wealth surely exceeded his country's GDP.

That question of significance - were we too much, not enough, or in fact irrelevant? - echoed, for me, in every temple we visited, every patient explanation by our excellent guides of the complexities of Buddhist philosophy, every encounter with the researchers and engineers and civil servants moving the country forward and the shopkeepers and hotel workers and drivers who hosted us.

What my therapist meant, all those years ago, was not that I wasn't special. But that we all are. The drive to be more special - most special, the best! - is at its core an impulse of separation. My therapist knew that despite my drive to excel and to be recognized for being excellent, my deepest desire was connection. 

There's nothing like the dislocation of travel - buildings older and altitudes higher than any back home, body clock and wrist watch diametrically opposed - to strip us down to a naked contemplation of who we are, where we belong, and what matters. It can be terrifying to consider our own insignificance. And a profound relief.

I left Bhutan with a new friend and long-distance colleague (meet Tshering Dendup, with me in the slideshow below) and a sense of the world, my world, as a much, much bigger place to which somehow, at the same time, I am more preciously connected.

Last weekend Amber and I set off for our sixth (and likely last) backpacking adventure of 2013. We knew we wanted to launch our weekend get-away on Friday. We weren't paying attention to the date. Friday the 13th.

Normally we're not terribly supersticious - but an hour into the trip had us wondering if it was ill-fated. 

Amber had loaded the car while I wrapped up work in my home office before heading into the tedium of weekend rush hour traffic (and why is it called rush...?) Finally past the constipation on the Interstate, traveling a reasonable 50 MPH, Amber gasped, "Oh, no!" What? What? "I forgot our sleeping bags!"

Should we head home for the bags and start again the next day? With a relatively open road finally in front of us, we rejected that dismal course. Instead we Googled our way to the nearest sporting goods store and picked up two of the cheapest bags they carried. Would their enormous polyester bulk even fit into our packs? Probably not, but we would deal with that later.

Back on the road, eager to make up for lost time and reach our destination before dark, Friday the 13th again reared its head.

"Oh, no!" What? What?

"Is that cop coming after us?"  Yes, he was - but amazingly he gave us only a cheerful warning. Maybe we weren't doomed after all.

It wasn't until we'd set up camp near our trailhead and settled in for some fireside Scrabble that I asked Amber to grab something from my backpack in the trunk.

This time she skipped the "Oh, no!" The stricken silence on her face when she came back from the car empty-handed said it all.

Our backpacks had never made it into the car. All the contents, we had in bins and stuff sacks. But our homes-away-from-home, the turtle shells we'd carried 100 miles around Mt Rainier two years earlier and since then on every trail we found the time for - they were resting comfortably in our guest bedroom back in Portland.

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Earlier in the summer, a turtle had appeared to me during a guided meditation. I claimed it as a symbol of protection, a reminder that I could draw up into myself and find guidance from within. That when my fires burned too hot, I could put my feet down on earth, slip into water, wag my head in the air.  

Slowing down, pacing yourself, emotional strength and ancient wisdom - these are the characteristics identified with the turtle totem.

I shouldn't have been astonished to arrive at Michigan Womyn's Music Festival to find that she, too, was calling forth the mighty turtle. Each year the Festival opens with a powerful ceremony tapping into timeless themes made relevant for a modern, multi-generational tribe. This year, the ceremony creators found 2013 reflected back to them in the 13 compartments on a turtle's back. The prop artists fashioned a bale of giant turtles (yep, a bale is what you call a bunch of these particular critters). Amazon warriors processed with them to the stage to the cheers of thousands of women and girls, united in that moment in this display of power and persistence. 

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I didn't realize how strongly I've come to identify with the turtle until Friday the 13th, there in the campground, when we realized we wouldn't be hoisting our packs onto our backs the next day.

A three-hour round-trip back to fetch them was out - we felt supersticious about what might befall us on the Interstate. We would have to settle for day hiking, our water bladders and snacks strapped to our bodies with bandanas.

As lovely as a day-hike could be, the draw to carry all I needed for a night in the woods, to be fully self-sufficient out in nature for a 36 hour stretch, continued to assert itself. 

And so, 20 minutes into our day hike, when we found a lakeside campsite with its own private huckeberry patch, we decided we could backpack after all, even without our packs. We left our water bladders to claim our space and returned to the car where we latched tent bag to food bag and slung them over one shoulder, lashed on gear and spare clothes with whatever straps we could find, and wrapped my arms around those ginormous sleeping bags.

Up the hill we trudged with our unwieldy loads, feeling very Beverly Hillbillies - and pretty darn inventive. 

The apparently cursed trip turned out to be one of our very best. The rest of the weekend backpacker crowd bypassed our lovely lake in pursuit of further destinations. Once we had our homey camp set up we took a leisurely unfettered hike through miles of nearby lakes and meadows.

When we got back to camp at the end of the day, we dipped into the lake. Yes, that's an air mattress, also hand carried from the car - something that never would have made it on a "real" backpacking trip.

At dusk as the moon began rising over the lake, neighbors on the opposite shore brought out mandolin and fiddle and offered sweet lullabies to this charmed day.

The next morning, fresh picked huckleberries for our oatmeal.

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As day and night come into balance and summer yields to fall, may you enjoy the home life you find within, and that which you discover when you find yourself without your shell.