If you’ve read my work long enough, you’ll know I was raised in ultra-strict religion.

I've told the true story of how many times I was allowed to choose something for myself—maybe once or twice when Mom and my Mamaw took me and my brother school clothes shopping. Outside of that narrow arena, I didn't feel as if my life was my own.

I graduated high school in the top 5 of my class and earned a scholarship to the illustrious Berea College in Berea, Kentucky. This college is one of the top in the nation—not just for academics and arts and crafts, though it's renowned for both. Berea College is famous for something else entirely: no tuition. Students have mandatory jobs on campus, everything from food service to custodial work, from broom weaving to pottery making, radio DJing to audio visual engineering.

I was lucky enough to land a job in audio visual services back in 1984, unlike my lifelong friend who had to get up before the crack of dawn to crack 500 eggs every morning with his own hands. Ew.

Even though I was sad to leave my family and small Kentucky town, I was ecstatic for the college experience. Let's face it: I was naive to the nth degree. Being there was like discovering Southern sweet tea for the first time after only drinking unsweet—the experiences, the interactions, the freedom made my head swim. But it became like a drug to me, and pretty soon those experiences overshadowed the academic work.

Those early years, I intended to major in nursing per my parents' wishes. Now I know their hearts were in the right place—they wanted me to be financially secure. But at barely eighteen, I wasn't concerned with finances. I was concerned with freedom. And my lack of control with this experience being my first taste of real liberty ended up being a train wreck.

But there was one particular day that changed everything.

Every year, the whole college dismissed class for Mountain Day, and everyone climbs up the Twin Pinnacles, two ancient and awe-inspiring mountains. Afterwards, there were cookouts and booths set up. This day was my first REAL taste of freedom. No classes to attend, nowhere really to be; but I was a member of the Baptist Student Union (of course), and we'd decided to make the climb up together.

The trail wound upward through dense woodland where morning mist still clung to the understory, each step releasing the rich, loamy scent of decomposing leaves mixed with the sharp, resinous bite of cedar and pine. My sneakers found purchase on rain-slicked roots that snaked across the narrow path like nature's own obstacle course.

For most of my classmates, this was a challenge. They huffed and panted, stopping frequently to catch their breath, their faces flushed with exerting energy. But for this Kentucky girl who grew up farming, growing vegetables, digging fence posts and helping cut and haul wood for winter—this was a breeze. My body knew this kind of work. My calves had been trained on steep hillsides, my hands toughened by rough bark and growing-up-in-the-country labor.

Still, I felt my t-shirt cling to my back with heavy sweat as we climbed higher. The rough bark bit into my palms each time I steadied myself on the steeper sections, and my heartbeat drummed steady in my ears.

When I climbed up that last hard, steep climb and the trees suddenly parted like curtains, my world exploded open.

Wind rushed across the exposed rock face, immediate and cool against my cheeks. It carried the warm, golden scent of sun-baked limestone and the green smell of leaves catching the late morning light. Ridge after ridge rolled into the distance, each one a softer blue-gray than the last, until they dissolved into the hazy atmosphere of early autumn.

But it was the air itself that changed everything.

I inhaled deep, and the breath seemed to expand not just my lungs, but my entire ribcage. The air was different up here—thinner, cleaner, almost electric. It tasted sharp and metallic, sparking against my tongue with a taste I'd never experienced in the controlled spaces of the woods in my childhood. My chest rose until the stretch became almost painful, my ribs spreading wide as if trying to contain something larger than just oxygen.

And then I felt it, although I couldn’t name it at the time: Something inside me began to unclench. There was an anxiety, a tension I hadn't even known I was carrying that was wound tight around my shoulders, locked behind my sternum. And it suddenly released. Goosebumps raced down my arms despite the warmth, and for one crystalline moment, the weight of a lifetime of others' expectations simply lifted away.

This breath belonged to no one but me. It was wild and unmeasured, unapproved by parents or pastors or anyone who thought they knew what I needed. It filled every corner of my lungs, every cell of my body, with a freedom so sharp and sudden it almost hurt—like stepping from a lifetime in shadows into brilliant, unfiltered sunlight.

I stood there, wind-whipped and breathing hard, feeling more myself than I ever had. This was what I'd been starving for without even knowing it. I couldn’t name it then - but now, I call this embodiment. I was fully living and experiencing life in my body.

Huge tears started to roll down my cheeks, but I sucked it up, embarrassed at my show of emotion while others were laughing and joking with each other. And the free girl-for-10-seconds quickly made herself small again.

And the irony, of course, was how quickly it all crumbled after that day.

That sweet tea of freedom became my obsession. The experiences, the late-night conversations, the intoxicating sense of choice, all overshadowed why I was really at college in the first place. Within months, my grades slipped. Within a year, I was struggling. I took a job on campus the next summer and began my pattern of looking for love and safety outside of myself in the form of relationships with men. I failed Anatomy and Physiology; I didn’t bother to go to class. Then, I failed Psychology. It just got worse from there. And eventually, the inevitable came - I was kicked out of college for being in the wrong place at the wrong time (more on that story later) and academic probation. Along with my failing grades, my parent’s voices were tight with disappointment at the news. I moved back home, my head hung. The Golden Girl had failed.

The ground I thought I'd been standing on—grades, expectations, the prescribed path forward—gave way like loose gravel. Everything I'd built my identity around scattered like leaves in that mountain wind. I was back in my little rural Kentucky town. What do I do NOW?, I thought to myself. And tears again rolled down my cheeks.

But even as my world collapsed, even as I sat in my childhood bedroom staring at the wreckage of my first real shot at independence, I could still taste that mountain air. It lingered on my tongue like a promise—sharp, clean, and utterly mine.

But I had experienced a real breath of authenticity and freedom. And somehow, despite everything that followed—the guilt, shame, the setbacks, the long climb back to who I was meant to be, the desire for both never left. I just had no idea how to get back there or what I needed to do to even begin to heal.

Here's what I didn't understand for over forty years: I thought that mountain, that wind, and that view had given me freedom. I believed the safety, the love, the wild liberation I felt in that moment was created outside of me…by the place, by the circumstances, by finally escaping the constraints of home.

I was wrong.

The freedom and truth of my power had been created by me. It was mine all along. The mountain didn't hand it to me like some mystical gift; I carried it all the way up that trail in my own lungs, in my own heart, in my own willingness to climb. The breath that changed everything wasn't the mountain's to give. It was mine to take.

It took me four decades to remember and truly embody what that seventeen-year-old girl briefly experienced. The freedom I thought the mountain gave me was the freedom I brought inside me to the mountain. It was me all along.

We exhaust ourselves searching outside of us for what's been inside us all along.

JOY. LOVE. TRUTH. AUTHENTICITY. I want, I hope, I need YOU to remember this too. Because when ONE of us takes a baby step of healing and remembering, we affect the the planet. And as we heal, humanity evolves. One step at a time.

More to come. I can’t wait to tell you what’s unfolding next!

Debby

Things Lighting Me Up This Week:

• I have begun the Meditation Teacher 100 hour track and I’m ecstatic!

• These Native American drone flutes!

• Ajeet - Light of My Soul: My painting music for years now!

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