Soul Shaping Tails – A Sneaky Preview of My Book

Travel can be an experience that makes your heart pound out of your chest with excitement for all that is to come.

 

Travel can be lonely. Scary. Humbling at times when you’d rather feel confident.

Rejuvenating when your outlook feels low. Enlightening when you didn’t expect it.

 

When travelling, I have found myself so completely happy with where I find myself that all I want is to crouch down low to the place I am in. Dig my fingers right into the soft, dark earth beneath my feet.

 

I never want to let go of how this feels. I want to cling to the earth with my bare hands and hold precious in that earth the very essence of the moment.

 

I didn’t board my first plane expecting to return months later, seasoned with experience and muddy-footed knowledge of what being a traveller truly means on the deeper, soul-shaping kind of level. Nor did I understand there is a place within us where we truly discover what our life can be. But that’s what happened. And I came back with an unquenchable thirst for more.

 

I had planned a four-month trip overseas, which seemed a very long time to be away from home, so limited was my sense of travelling back then. However, seven years would have come to pass by the time I boarded my final one-way return flight out of London and to Los Angeles.

 

This is a story about those seven years.

 

This isn’t a story about travel for the purpose of career exploration or the pursuit of love and hot summer romances, although those very much play a lively part in those years.

 

This isn’t a story about seaside holidays and fruity cocktails, or camping expeditions and scenic mountain treks, or close encounters with wildlife and harrowing escapades, although these narratives weave their way throughout this story too.

 

This isn’t a story about the brightness of life or the sudden darkness of death, but of course, you’ll find that here too.

 

This is a story about travel and how it can open up a life in beautiful and tragic ways. How travel flips us upside down, propels us forward and sideways and wrong-ways and right-ways again.

 

And how it can hold us perfectly still in a crystal moment.

 

This is a story about how a trip becomes a journey and travel becomes an experience. A story about the ways travel seeps into the soul and gives it a good shaking. Or a good shaping.

 

I’m going to have to say I’m 50/50 on that one. Travel has shaken and shaped my soul to the very core.

 

Through these stories, I want to share with you just how that happened.

 

We’ll traverse medieval landscapes in broken boots, traipse barefoot through olive tree-scented Italian towns, flirt with Greek lovers by the sea, survive Bulgarian mountain snowstorms, and embark on an epic Pilgrimage across Spain.

 

We’ll meet the faces, hear the voices and join the chatter of every kind of person who stepped into my path and journeyed along with me for part of the way.

 

But first, let’s start with the animals.

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Interested in the entire book?