Tuesday, March 23, 2010

Red Bricks

When I was a junior in college, my best friend and I took a film class together. One of the films we analyzed clips from was The Wizard of Oz. When Dorothy sets out from Munchkinland to the Emerald City, she's following the yellow brick road, which starts in a spiral, along with a red brick path. We jokingly wondered where that red brick road goes. Since then, I've used that as the title of my blogs anywhere. Where does the Red Brick Road go?

You see, Oz is a fantasy world in Dorothy's mind. One that has built her up to be a heroine when, if you recall the black and white beginnings of the film, she's nothing more than a spoiled brat. She's young and immature, and it takes the journey of Oz for her to learn that it's not all about her.

There's no place like home. So, where's home?

Not here. As my pastor pointed out the other Sunday, when it was a beautiful day in Southern California, this is as close to hell as we'll ever get. Ironic to me, because moving to CA was my definition of hell nearly six years ago. I was leaving friends, family, and a faith that had grown in the safety of a college environment that was more conservative than not. I didn't mean to leave that faith behind, honest. But there was something about CALIFORNIA that loomed large and scary in my mind. I'm a country girl. Give me farmland and trees, and weather. I felt suffocated moving to CA, even to such a 'conservative part' like Orange County. I clung to the life I'd known in PA, to my friendships and tried to live with my heart separated from my body.

If home is where the heart is, my heart wasn't in me.

It took a while for me to learn to hang on tightly to the memories and the love, but to let go, lightly, of the day to day things, the parts of life I couldn't connect with anymore. My best friends, my chicas, were 3 hours behind me, timewise, and in a whole different world from me realitywise. I had to make new friends, new family, and I have. My journey wasn't on the yellow brick road. I took the red brick one, to California, and beyond that, to a place where I don't live comfortably on this earth.

I learned that lesson the hard way, not to be too comfortable where you are. I don't know all the reasons why, but I do know that as rooted as I once was in BC (Before California) my life is IC (In California), and it is as temporary as all life is. BC might have felt permanent, but it isn't. None of it is. So I'm following the Red Brick Road, wherever it leads me. It will eventually turn to gold, but that's for another life.

No comments: