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This past November I boarded a plane to Guatemala. The first time as a 39 year old woman that I’d ever left the country. I fully expected to come back with a refreshed outlook on life and appreciation for the privileges that I do have, as a white American. What I definitely didn’t expect to find was…so much of myself that I’d been denying for the greater part of my life. Last March I returned home to Idaho after spending 2 months in L.A. Something inside of me was aching for more but I didn’t know what. I started Googling, like any driven person with access to the Internet, and was drawn almost immediately to a women’s retreat on Lake Atitlan in Guatemala. I was intimidated for sure. I was also so ignited, deep inside a place that I didn’t even realize was still a part of myself, I became obsessed. There was no way I wasn’t going. I wanted to find my passion for life. I wanted to take time to think through the things I am chasing in my life, and really think about why. I wanted to get out of, or fully commit to, the relationship I’d spent the last 11 years hardly existing in. I called my best friend to take this journey with me. Because like any sheltered first world woman, some part of me bought into all the fear culture around traveling to a country where people didn’t all speak English or have access to a Starbucks on every corner. As much as I chastised my family for their “ignorance” and fear, a part of me felt it too. Stephanie and I boarded our plane on November 27th. That day I left life as I’d convinced myself it was. I journeyed into truth. Or at least a brand new reality for myself. I spent the next 10 days of my life having my world completely blown open. The first two days were spent navigating a four-hour journey in a language I am grateful to be more capable in than I ever thought would been possible from a few years of classes at Boise State University. We spent a beautiful evening in Antigua. I was heartbroken by the poverty. I was even more heartbroken by my judgment of it and my lack of exposure to life being anything other than convenient. It was absolutely beautiful. There was a rhythm that seemed to flow between the people, the buildings and the Earth that I have never felt in the “civilized” world. I felt at home. Maybe just within myself, away from the stressors we create for ourselves in our world of “privilege”…which I’m starting to think translates into “problems that really aren’t…but make us feel important”. The next morning, Stephanie and I walked toward the outskirts of Antigua. We were meeting a woman that neither of us had ever laid eyes on before to all board a bus together. We each carried a backpack, all we were really able to bring on this trip due to a looming hike to our retreat area. We found Hannah, amidst street dogs and chicken buses, and got onto the shuttle that would take me further into the journey of a damn lifetime. We drove through time. We drove through poverty. We drove through the most spiritual land I have ever been in. We met up with Sonja. A woman from Germany who unbeknownst to me was about to become one of the most inspirational women I have ever met. We lost Sonja two hours later to a shuttle transfer that none of us saw coming. Multiple poorly conjugated conversations, one tuk tuk ride and a coffee shop that barely showed up on Mapquest (with no working bathroom by the way) later, SHE waltzed—slammed?-into my existence. The air changed. Not in that cheesy, flowery way of “I’m in love and I know it”. My stomach dropped. I fought it with everything I knew how to. I need more than 700 words to describe the next 10 days. The acceptance. The surrender. The love (of self and others). The heartbreak. The change. The beauty. The hope. The want for more.