A couple of years ago, I started a (very short-lived) podcast called Wandering Roots. My first interview was with my dear friend Barbara Gold Shoes. We talked about becoming free, and how this almost always looks like shedding layers and identities we’ve picked up over the years and discovering who we always were underneath it all, before the world told us who to be. Being free, it turns out, is often achieved by just, well, being. It’s more of a process of subtraction than addition, kind of like finding God.

Barbara was born by a different name, a little queer kid in a rural town who acted like a proper rough and tumble boy’s boy when he was anywhere other than at his beloved grandmother’s house. When he was with his grandma, he would immediately go into her closet and don her magical golden high heels, and he would sing into a spatula and dance for her while she cheered and applauded. This was the only place where he didn’t need to pretend.

When his parents found out, they sat him down, this precious little five-year-old, and said, “Son, you are not gay,” with enough indignation and fear in their eyes to communicate to him that this was a very, very bad thing to be.

Later he got married to a woman and tried to check all the boxes of what a “strong Christian man” should look and act like, but he was dying inside, always dreaming of those gold shoes. His grandmother had allowed him a taste of freedom, and it was this deep cellular remembering that gave him the courage to go looking for it again.

He did the bravest thing imaginable and finally told his family the truth about who he was, and when I met him, despite the fact that he had been abandoned by most of those people, he was positively radiant with self-ownership. I complimented his fabulous platform gold high-tops, and he introduced himself as Barbara, after his late grandmother.

I loved him right away, as you sometimes do when you meet people who you suspect you have known for a very, very long time.

The title Wandering Roots was initially birthed in a hot tub in Costa Rica with my best friends back in 2005, before podcasts were even a thing. We were all dreaming about starting a little commune together where we could offer reiki and massage and guided snorkels and good food to people who stumbled upon our magical little oasis. None of us really knows who came up with the name- we each claim it as our own- but that makes it even better, I think. It seemed like an apt title for five nomadic women who had found their true home together, no matter how far their roots spread out over the globe.

These were some of the first people I completely stopped pretending around- being with them was like donning my own gold shoes and singing at the top of my lungs to raucous applause.

We’ve all found kids or partners or careers that have rooted us elsewhere now, some twenty years later, but still, we dream about retiring to an island together when we are old. Someone will burst through the door reporting which intertidal neighbors have been spotted down on the beach while someone else brews a second or third pot of coffee and another one zips off to town to get ingredients for dinner on our shared moped. We’ll be all white hair and sandy feet and swaying breasts, a tight fist uncurled, a long exhale after decades of holding our bellies in. This is the place I always return to when I am weary- the place with old crones and unlocked doors and wrinkled, salty skin.

Back to the podcast, though. The podcast became less about what my sisters and I had hatched up that night in Central America, and more about what it personally meant for me to break out of containers that made me feel rootbound. One such container had been the conservative Christian beliefs that had been passed down to me, and before that my father, and before that my grandparents and great grandparents all the way up to the highest branches of our family tree. Here’s the thing about that particular container- it held me and sheltered me and nourished me very well until, one day, it didn’t. My natal religion gave me a spiritual worldview that included magic and hope and compassion and the upliftment of the underdog and the belief that death and despair do not get the last word.

But as my lived experiences nourished and watered my roots over the years, as I fell in love with the world and learned how to listen with different ears and see with wider eyes than the limited ones I had been conditioned to use, my roots naturally grew and grew and got all bound up in that little pot that had once held me so well. Plants can live like this, you know. They can survive for quite some time with a tightly bound root ball; it usually won’t kill them. What it will do is stunt its growth rather dramatically.

I had to decide whether I wanted to stay small and “safe”, or whether I wanted to crack through the only container I had ever really known.

The breaking wasn’t dramatic. Maybe it started with some s-cracks on the base, and then those migrated into hairline fractures up the sides, and then those fissures opened up and some soil started spilling out onto the deck. I lived in that disheveled container for many years, until one day I had enough of the ache inside my cells and said, “not this” and I broke all the way out.

I tried on some bigger pots for a while, testing out more spacious homes that felt like maybe they could hold me. But none of them were quite right, and I wondered if I was just destined to be uncomfortable. I thought maybe I was too picky, a spiritual misfit of sorts.

And then I did a wild thing and shed all the containers. I followed my knowing right into some fertile soil in an old growth forest, and I stopped searching and let myself reach as far and wide and deep into the ground as I could, and I asked the whole entire ecosystem to hold me. And the craziest thing happened. I finally started to grow. And grow. And grow. I figured out I was, in fact, a giant redwood. No wonder all the pots in the world felt too small. I had no idea what kind of organism I was until I returned to the home that had been calling me all along.

Friends, I am breaking out of another container right now, one that I will tell you about in time, and I have to tell you, it’s exhausting.

Everyone who knows about relocating saplings knows that when this transition from greenhouse or nursey to new ground is facilitated, the plant can get all stressed out. It needs a remarkable amount of water right after it’s replanted. Water, water, water and heaps of sunlight on top of that. Also, just the right amount of shade so it doesn’t wilt. It will sit shocked in its new home at first, getting its bearings, but once it has determined that it is safe and it has everything it needs, it will begin to unfurl its roots and reach ever upward and one day produce fruit or catkins or flowers or a riot of fluffy, downy messengers which will take root somewhere else, heralding new life.

I know that all this will happen in time, but right now I’m sitting in the not-knowing, the where-am-I the am-I-okay, and I’m tentatively assessing the promising but entirely unfamiliar terrain that has called me to it.

I don’t mean to be cryptic, but I think there’s a time to write about our lives and there’s a time when we allow ourselves the space we need to receive water and sunlight until we feel safe enough to unfurl.

Thanks for holding that space for me so beautifully while I take a little break from memoir writing. I thought that I had the capacity to tackle a new chapter until I sat today with the herculean task of trying to articulate my experience living in Denali National Park, and I just couldn’t do it. Not right now, not in this place.

I feel something at the edges of my vision, though, and I trust it will come into view when I’m ready to see it without squinting. I’m not letting fear direct the narrative in my head. I’m only letting Love in right now.

And this is where the wise old redwood in me whispers my own words from last week’s essay right back to me:

Please, don’t be afraid.

The story can only ever end with you, bathed in moonlight.

To anyone else who needs to hear it: may you rest as you break out of your own root-bound containers, and may you find the place that is calling you home, where you can unfurl and remember who you’ve always been.

Gold shoes, relaxed bellies, salty skin.

P.S. Please enjoy this joyful song from Barbara’s first EP: This Is Who You Are