Professional Pilgrimage

It's hard to know exactly when the rigor mortis of the soul began to set in. Maybe it was when the piles of paper on my desk took over, obscuring my vision of both the room and a self-determined future; maybe it was when I found myself in the office for the third major holiday in a calendar year; or perhaps it was when the fear began to infiltrate my circulatory system, quietly creeping its way from gut to limb and back again. My neck was stiffening and not a single note of melody was in my belly,
But, in some ways, I was comfortable.

I loved the mission and substance of my work in book publishing. I loved having a good job, the respect of my peers, and a steady paycheck. But seven years behind a desk had begun to squash my original spirit. It was time for a change. Travel, my long, lost elixir and instinctual North Star, was the answer. So I carved out a three-week trip in order to jettison myself out of my comfort zone, and sort myself out.

The hot belly of a Sumatran jungle would do just fine. I booked the ticket.

Twenty days later, I found myself perched high in a heavy limbed tree I'd climbed at dawn,to catch a glimpse of the rising sun and a new day. To the north, over an archipelago, I looked at Borneo. A tinny call to prayer leaked in from the distant West; to the East lay the thick, wet Gunwung Leuser rainforest, which just spat me out after a week in its digestive tract; down, directly beneath me, a pile of Kleenex, damp and sickly yellow from blotting my weeping leech-bite pustules, was wedged between my crotch and the trunk. I was encrusted with a phylum's worth of bug corpses, and smeared with an Agent Orange-like repellent whose label falsely proclaimed it would deter them: The bug corpse-poison pastiche was sealed with an odd mildewy film that the rain forest silently sprays, like a cat in heat, on trespassers.

After weeks of trekking in punishing temperatures, I was undone, exhausted, broken and wildy happy. And it was there, straddling that limb, that the cards of Karma began to shuffle into place and I knew I would be fine.

The heat, the release from duties, the magic of not knowing what was going to happen next - somehow those odd gifts of pilgrimage scrubbed clean my calcifying soul , and made the next step possible.

In that moment I determined to quit my job and, live out my passions for adventure, politics and media, and have faith that I could whip them into a viable professional enterprise.

That particular tree-born epiphany was not so much about knowing exactly what was going to come next, as it was a willingness to cut ties and make change in the face of that uncertainty - and more to the point - in the face of likely failure. (Bottom line: I feared becoming a pod more than failure.) Overcoming a fear of 'failure' by knowing I could survive it, was the first step in pursuing my nascent new professional vision that would eventually coalesce into Adventure Divas - a multimedia company that would celebrate a new kind of iconography - fearless, maverick women around the globe.

Since that moment high up in that tree, I've had a several 'successes' and twice as many 'failures,' but I've never regretted, never been bored, and while I've tangoed with that insidious creep of fear, it's never gotten the last dance - and never will.

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