Personal Reflections, until next time…

Phase 1 of my journey is completed; I’m surrounded by scribbles, papers and data.

I am hugely grateful to colleagues who filled in for my “day job” and especially those who supported me in the dark week when jet lag, depression, disaster and climate nearly …nearly… dimmed the lights.

I feel privileged and valued to have been entrusted with the task that I decided must be done no matter the challenges ahead. It is a working Fellowship and the choice to haul around a tent and sleeping bag was a personal one.

That choice defined and added a dimension to my journey beyond all expectations.

I have lain under the Milky Way in a cold lava field in Idaho, listened to coyotes howling in the distance, surrounded by inky blackness. I walked amongst an explosion of Clark’s Nutcrackers, a keystone species and prolific avian forester (burying over 100,000 seeds a year!).

I found Bison hiding in the grassland and heard a lone Common Loon calling from a kettle pond in a forest.

I’ve been surrounded by Blue Birds, Dragonflies, Mosquitoes, spider webs and Blue Jays.

Picked wild apples, field mushrooms, Chicken of the Woods and blueberries. Was given lush, garden fresh, tomatoes and cucumbers.

I’ve met warm and welcoming people, not always the ones I had travelled to meet. Found a love for marshmallows cooked on a campfire. Tried, and largely failed, to capture the fragility of the Monarchs as they seemed to follow me on my journey through North Carolina, Vermont, Wyoming, Maine, and Massachusetts.

Each day brought a new horizon; was, and is, treasured as a gift. The journey was not smooth, there were tears and fears, it was challenging on any level you care to imagine. Possibly on some you can’t.

Somewhere between waving at the webcam on Jackson Hole main street, chatting to all and sundry and driving 5 hours across the Idaho Plains, with sudden clarity I realised that whilst I may be working, my spirit was on a transformational holiday.

You’ll understand that to relate 42 experiences (my travelling days) would be long and meaningless (…I can still hear someone asking why there was a Chicken in the Woods…). So alongside my Winston Churchill Fellowship Report in 2020, there will be a photo booklet, showing the personal journey, through my eyes.

I had a blast, I loved it, and I hope I will never be the same person I was when I set out. “Life-changing” is the only way to describe the effect the past 6 weeks have had.

See you in 2020 for Phase 2.