This year I’ve been traveling around the American West in a trailer with my partner and our dog. It’s been an extraordinary journey with many surprises. One of them has been the opportunity to boondock on BLM land, Boondocking is camping without any hookups and staying outside developed campgrounds. I admit that I had some trepidation at first. When we set up camp on the BLM land in Holtville, California, I kept thinking about all the comments I read on the boondocking community Facebook pages—don’t approach a boondocker, don’t meet people’s eye, keep to yourself. Even worse, I scrolled through comments like this one, Have a weapon by you while you sleep A gun, a big knife, small knife, golf club, and practice with it. Getting out of bed while grabbing it, seeing what works and what doesn’t. As we rolled into our first boondocking site in Holtville, California, for the first time on our trip I was unsure of our decision.
What I experienced was the opposite of the inherent fear in those online posts: as we drove in people smiled and waved, they stopped us on our walks to chat, they invited us in. They also took care of the land, and volunteers from the boondocking area even cleaned the hot spring across the road every week. Every day we soaked in the spring and joined conversations about books, traveling, climate change, trailers, the economy . . . all sorts of topics. We loved our month living in what we came to see was a real community—a family that came together in support of one another. You might want to check out my blog post, Circles, where I tell a story about the remarkable way people there embraced a woman with a duck.
This experience of coming together has been repeated time and again this year. I’ve begun to viscerally understand our primal need to build community and to trust that what I am experiencing on the road can be replicated anywhere. I am living into a solid truth that we belong to one another. And I’m learning to trust that deep down we all know that we belong. We know how to lean in and support one another; we know how to love. We simply need to look around.
This is why I am building a mindfulness meditation community. Something magical happens when we come together to meditate in community. We laugh, we connect, and we learn from one another. I hope you will come to one of our Sunday sessions and find out.
