Life an Adventure
My day started with the sun creeping over the peaks… I ran on the mountain road watching the day break on another new and different training ground for my feet, every step leading me paso a paso on an adventure that they seem to be planning themselves…!
Later just as I was about to leave our breakfast get together, where we had been enjoying celebrating Maggie’s birthday over Cafe con leche y tostados, Maggie said… ‘I don’t think we’re on a journey, I think we are on an adventure…’
‘Yes, yes’… I had responded; ‘We really are on an adventure…
I arrived here in Bubion in the Alpujarras last night and met up with Jack and Maggie for goat cheese salad and to catch up… We talked about El plan, my quest to run Barefoot Across Spain next spring, and the process they have been engaged in since the idea was hatched…
They have been plotting the route, which will go from the North Coast to the South coast, right through the middle of España – in the last month they have driven sections of it too, and report that the landscape is breathtakingly beautiful…
‘It’s been a big journey for us…’ Maggie was saying; which is why this morning on reflection we are agreed that the journey has more of a sense of an adventure about it…
Life an adventure… To adventure is more fun than to live in fear…
When we feel anxious or worried all we need do is remember this, that we are on an adventure, with the plot unfolding as in any good adventure story… We are both writing it, and directing and acting the main lead role in the film of the book… We are improvising, making it up as we go…
And yet it is already written, and deep within us, our soul knows its course… When we let go and listen to the essence of love within us, the silence in our breath – we will find our writing will be guided, and our moves on the stage of life will flow from this wisdom, and we will find there is no place for fear.
But there is no rush… Life an adventure reveals its way, the road opening as we tread it.
I have wondered if the knowledge of this adventure didn’t start to herald itself within me forty years ago when I read ‘As I walked out one midsummer morning’ by Laurie Lee… The book touched something within me which resonated then, and has reverberated over the years.
These words gave me a sense of the purpose of my soul…
“I felt it was for this I had come: to wake at dawn on a hillside and look out on a world for which I had no words, to start at the beginning, speechless and without plan, in a place that still had no memories for me.”
My life in the most recent years as a nomad, resembles these words… The paradox is that from this place of not knowing and not planning, of trusting and allowing the guidance of my soul; ‘El plan‘, the adventure has emerged and a grand fiesta is unfolding in every step…
I have been running all of my life – it feels I was born to run. In the running step I experienced freedom and my true expression. I came to see that I needed to ‘get out of the way of myself’ and let my energy flow through the running step; allow it to express itself in the dance and the motion of running. I ran for England and GB for some years. My first international was in 1979, a three mile cross country race; and I continued to run at international level until 1993. Two of my best results were first place in the Dublin City Marathon in 1985 and 7th place woman, 3rd British woman in the 1986 London Marathon in a time of 2.36.31, which gained me selection for the Commonwealth Games.As a little girl I ran barefoot for many years, and then I put on shoes to race around the world. Fifty years later I am travelling the world as a nomad with my husband Anadi and I have taken off my shoes and I am running barefoot again….Website
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