The heat in Manila goes unabated but the truth is, summer is almost gone.
Over the last five years, summer vacations—outside of those I had with my children—have always been to the US, more often than not to places I’ve never been, or to cities I had not visited in a long while.
Travel is wonderful in the sense that you never return from a place the same again. Some places stand out more than others. Today I looked back on places that have left an indelible mark on my heart.
“If you’re brave enough to leave behind everything familiar and comforting, which can be anything from your house to bitter, old resentments, and set out on a truth-seeking journey, either externally or internally, and if you are truly willing to regard everything that happens to you on that journey as a clue, and if you accept everyone you meet along the way as a teacher, and if you are prepared, most of all, to face and forgive some very difficult realities about yourself, then the truth will not be withheld from you.”—Elizabeth Gilbert
Completely changed
In 2009 I found myself in Brentwood, California, alone for most of the day in a retreat house called Awakening. I lived in a house perched on a hill.
Writing about the experience, I said: “I was frightened by the silence. The stillness was deafening. A couple of days later, solitude has become my new best friend. I understand now how, in the stillness, you are able to hear yourself better and connect with all that is hidden within you.
“Every joy, every sorrow, every thought held captive rises to the surface and when it does, you catch it, stay with it and take the time to step back and be still, relieving yourself of the day-to-day cares of the world and the voices that drown you out, you learn to see the world and your life with new eyes. The ground beneath you shifts, and everything, in that transformative moment, is changed forever.”
I returned to Manila completely changed by my time spent at Awakening. Setting out solo on the road not taken.
“There are several ways to react to being lost. One is to panic. Another is to abandon yourself to lostness, to allow the fact that you’ve misplaced yourself to change the way you experience the world,” wrote Audrey Niffeneger in the book “Her Fearful Symmetry.”
I’m a hopeless romantic. Since I saw the film “Nights in Rodanthe,” my bucket list has included going to the house where Diane Lane and Richard Gere met, and see it up close. I’m strange that way. And in 2012, my dear friend Tessa and I did just that.
Traveling from Tessa’s home in Atlanta and driving through the beautiful Carolinas, we reached the bridge that would take us into the breathtaking and serene Outerbanks at dusk. Navigating the thick fog was quite a challenge! The day before we had already driven through a hail storm.
It was quite some time before we found her, Serendipity, the house where “Nights in Rodanthe” had been filmed. She stood majestic, a few meters away from the Atlantic Ocean and Tessa and I stopped in our tracks as we gazed at her beauty, admiring her from afar in the fading light of day.
We spent the night in Pamlico Sound, in the very same B&B where Nicholas Sparks wrote the screenplay of the movie. The following morning I scribbled, “One thing I have found is that you can actually find your own Rodanthe; a place synonymous with love, romance and sad endings need not be so, if you choose it to be.
“The visit here was an excellent reminder of the endless possibilities of life and how one must never cease to dream, hope and strive for goals, age notwithstanding… that the destination is never the end point, and the detours and U-turns that one sometimes has to take are a crucial part of the trip.
“It is in the gentle unfolding of each day, the joy and magic of discovering new things, sights and people on the journey that the miracles take place.”
“There is a kind of magic about going far away and then coming back all changed.”—Kate Wiggins
Ruin and transformation
It had been 24 years since I last set foot in New York City.
I was hesitant to return, for personal reasons. But when our bus finally arrived, in the hustle and bustle that is NYC, I somehow knew in my heart that I had made the right decision. Amie, one of my dearest and oldest girlfriends, took the lead in bringing me around. Central Park took my breath away and she and I could have spent the afternoon there just soaking in the sights and sounds.
Favorite photos
One of my favorite photos from that afternoon is of the two of us in Strawberry Fields, in front of the iconic black and white “Imagine” mosaic. We had been friends since we were 12, and though we had gone on different paths, we would often come together at various critical times in our lives.
However, it was in the evening, in an area of the city called The High Line, where my heart spilled over with joy.
The High Line, a public park built on a historic freight rail line elevated above the streets on Manhattan’s West Side, runs from Gansevoort Street in the Meatpacking District to West 34th Street, between 10th and 11th Avenues. Built in the 1930s as part of a massive public-private infrastructure project called the West Side Improvement, it lost its usefulness and was under threat of demolition.
Friends of the High Line, a community-based nonprofit group formed in 1999, worked in partnership with the City of New York to preserve and maintain the structure as an elevated public park. Today it is a beautiful park, with wonderfully designed wooden lounging chairs and benches, rambling flowers and greenery that has made a home on what used to be railroad tracks.
What struck me was the beauty that could be found or made from something that had been deemed useless or ruined. Standing there at dusk and looking out into the Hudson River, I was reminded of what author Elizabeth Gilbert said, that ruin could be the road to transformation.
“You will shed whatever (and whomever) you need to shed. You will find whatever (and whomever) you need to find. You will crawl and bawl. Until eventually you are standing, finally, on your own two feet in your own shower of light. Until you are the person you never would have been, had you never met your own worst darkness face-to-face. And that is the gift that ruin offers us.”
And so in the darkness of that evening in April, with a heart spilling over with joy, I gave quiet thanks. That no matter where we are—in the heat of Manila, or shrouded in a mystical fog in San Francisco, captivated by the sounds of the Atlantic Ocean on the Outerbanks, or in the middle of a noisy restaurant in NYC, God finds a way to reach deep into our hearts, and that we are never, ever far away from His grace.
E-mail the author at storiesbykate @gmail.com Follow her on Twitter @cathybabao