The People You Meet in the Middle of Becoming

I went to Nova Scotia because I needed to leave. I came home thinking about all the strangers we meet between one life and the next.

I honestly don’t know why I went to Nova Scotia.

Something happened to me somewhere between the end of June and the beginning of July, and I guess I just kind of hit a breaking point.

It had been about two years since I had traveled anywhere internationally, and for anybody who knows me, you know this is not good for me. Like, borderline I’m-going-to-lose-my-shit territory.

A little backstory: I have been looking for a church to buy because I want to start my own creative church. And Nova Scotia kept popping up in my searches with these tiny white churches and red roofs, and I think that is probably what first piqued my interest.

But I didn’t really know anything about Nova Scotia.

I just knew I wanted to get out of town. I wanted to go international, but I didn’t want to go too far. And I love coastal towns.

AKA I needed a reason to use my passport!

One of my favorite places I have ever been is Anstruther, a little fishing town in the East Neuk of Fife on the east coast of Scotland. It is the kind of place with a working harbor, old fishing buildings, boats, and narrow streets that makes me immediately start wondering what happened here. It is also home to the Scottish Fisheries Museum, housed in a collection of historic buildings, some dating to the 16th century.

That is the kind of place I am drawn to. Places at the edge of things. Places that show me time has passed with their old buildings and hand tied knots.

So maybe I thought Nova Scotia would give me some of that.

But instead, what I found seemed to be people who were standing in transitional doorways themselves.

First there was Tim, who was writing his memoir.

Then there was Margaret.

Margaret had recently put her husband into a care facility because of his dementia. She sold antiques out of her house, and I just happened upon her while driving down a back road. I walked out of there with a pound of old newspapers and ephemera I want to use to make art from.

Then there was Sara, the daughter of Martinique, who ran the tiny bed-and-breakfast where we stayed.

Martinique had fostered more than 80 children. I said: eighty.

Sara was one of her biological children, and now she is forging her own way—literally—as a blacksmith in Nova Scotia.

Then there was the church theater.

I happened to see this enormous moose outside and obviously needed to know what the hell was going on in there.

So I went inside.

And I couldn’t believe what was happening.

Here was this church being used as a theater, filled with people making something together, a scarecrow village for the fall. Another strange little place I had accidentally walked into because something outside made me curious enough to stop.

And then, as I made my way to the other side of Nova Scotia, I met Dena.

I was on a short walk, just checking out the coastline, when I started talking to her.

Her mother had just died.

It was the first day she had gone outside.

I can’t tell you how many times in my life I have been traveling and some stranger I met along the way somehow got me through whatever I was trying to process.

My airplane strangers.

My train strangers.

My standing-in-line-at-the-checkout strangers.

My crying-in-a-bathroom strangers.

Literally. All of those things have happened.

There is something about strangers.

Maybe it is because they don’t know the story you have already told everyone else about yourself.

They only know the person standing in front of them.

And maybe that gives us permission to be someone slightly different for a minute.

Or maybe we’re almost always meeting people in the middle of becoming someone they have never been before.

At least I seem to meet those people. Maybe because I recognize them.

I feel like my whole life has been about transformation.

I’ve had to transform myself over and over again. Like a phoenix rising from the ashes, knowing full well I’m probably going to keep burning.

And strangely, I’m actually okay with that. (Yay, bring it on!)

Turns out I have Scorpio in my chart. Scorpio is associated with death, rebirth and transformation, and Pluto shows up pretty loudly in my chart too. If you are into that kind of astrology stuff.

Apparently I was built for this.

I mean, truly.

I went to Nova Scotia not even knowing why I was going.

I just knew I was tired of doing what I had been doing.

And somewhere along the way, I ended up at the Bay of Fundy.

The Bay of Fundy has the highest tides in the world. At the head of the bay, the difference between high and low tide can reach about 16 metres—the height of a four-story building. When the tide goes out, whole stretches of ocean floor are exposed. You can literally walk where, hours earlier, there was an ocean.

And it is wildly weird.

It feels a little like walking into the apocalypse.

The water is just...gone.

Boats sit where boats should absolutely not be sitting. Mud and rock and seaweed stretch out in front of you. The entire landscape has been emptied of the thing that normally defines it.

And underneath is this whole other world that was there the entire time.

You just couldn’t see it.