This Way to Nowhere

Start by finding somewhere. Somewhere like a park, trail, or any land good for traipsing though. Find a path, and follow it for a while. Once you’re ready, turn right off the trail and follow the groove that water makes through dirt or scamper along a downed tree. Follow the contour of the land until the trail you are familiar with is out of sight. Now find a rock, a log, a tree, and sit. There! You’ve found your way to nowhere.

Nowhere is everywhere: places without names, places within places, unnamed areas in parks, unmarked hills, off-trail summits, and fields on the side of the road. The glorious places that life is filled with that naming would ruin. Nowhere is the space between places where your imagination and intuition guide you, where anything is possible, where nothing is claimed to be certain.

Finding nowhere is one of the joys of life. I found it in the Norway Spruce at my bus stop whose branches I clung to with glee and confidence and fear. At the top, the branches bent with the weight of a child, and I was in line with doves and church steeples. I went up there alone when the stress of the future and the complications of relationships were too much to bear. I climbed right to the tip, felt the wind as the tree does, swayed with it, and unbound my mind. There I was free to dream of solutions and imagine life the way I wanted. I still go to that place when I’m home. It is my room, my study, my hideaway. It is nothing more than branches and twigs. It is nowhere and nothing really, but it could be anything I needed it to be.

Nowhere is the trail behind the weather station, a naturally eroded path up the steep slope of the hill behind my home in Durango. The hill marks the northwest side of Horse Gulch, a trail system for hikers, bikers, and runners. Start up Skyline Trail then turn right onto Skyridge Trail. Where Skyridge meets Power-line Trail, turn left and look for the deer prints going straight up. Follow them into the shoulder-high oak scrub for a quarter mile towards nowhere.

It’s the edge of structured society, undesignated, unexplored, and untethered. The weather station path is where I can go to discover and pay attention. The steep ill maintained path means I have to watch my step. Only there, outside of trail classifications, do I notice the new plants at my feet. Away from the naming and claiming of designated trails, I can remove whatever pressures there were to move fast and fit in. When I’m nowhere behind the weather station I can slow down and explore the land and myself.

A name puts a cage around the things that have been or can be done there. The strips of grass and wildflowers in between highways are nowhere and nothing for most people, but on car rides, they are a playground for the imagination. There I can hunt with harriers on the wing or race with wolves. I can envision the seeds that floated across the landscape to create beauty on the edge of tarmac. That same field with an address in front and a house behind becomes a yard, mowed and managed by the folks who own it, with rules and limits and “No Trespassing” signs.

Nowhere is a place, but it's also a feeling. Being in the zone on a project, words and ideas and problem-solving flowing onto page or screen. Being nowhere is a feeling of play where you’re allowed and encouraged to think and live “outside the box.” Outside of tradition, outside of norms, and outside of judgment there is freedom for innovation, imagination, and self-expression.

Find nowhere and fight against rigidity and expectations. Embrace yourself and explore possibilities. Search for the in-between spaces in your life and dream without constraints. Where does the path lead that you create?