We’ve eaten, we’ve prayed, we’ve loved. What comes next?

A thirty something solo female traveller returns from an adventure, gets into bed and – stays there...

Ok, it's a tough sell and it isn’t particularly the story I wanted to write. But I have a feeling that many of us come to a point where the roads that carried us through our early adulthood have taken us as far as they can. At some point, for reasons we rarely choose, we have to learn a new way of travelling.

My whacky artist friend and I used to talk about ‘feasting from the buffet of life’, a Leanord Cohen quote that basically defined how we lived our 20s. Personally, I ate and ate and ate. If it was exciting and promised an interesting story, I did it: plant medicine. Communes. Spontaneous tattoos. Polyamory. Hitchsailing. Near-death experiences. Soul friends found in the most unexpected places. Indescribable beauty and unimaginable horror, often within the same 24 hours. 

Back then, I believed life was something we made happen. That if we were brave, imaginative and curious, the world would simply keep expanding before us. I was one of the lucky ones. For me, it did.

During those itinerant years, I became a successful travel writer, published numerous books, won awards and wrote for my dream publications. While it’s possible to become a travel writer with a comfortable life in London, I secretly felt that the most legit were actually on the road. If you really believed in travel as a way to understand the world – and hopefully change it and yourself for the better – why wouldn’t you be out there, living your stories?

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But now I find myself aged 34 with lingering post-viral fatigue.

It’s a strange illness. One minute you’re fine, next minute you’re ‘resting your eyes’ on the living room floor because you don’t have the energy to climb the stairs to bed. I am writing this on a boiling July evening having caught the virus last winter.

The unpredictability of it is the hardest part. It’s very difficult to plan anything, from a work trip to a phone call. Whatsapp is tiring. For all those who have been understanding as I cancelled plans and frequently fell out of contact, thank you. I am very grateful. 

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Fatigue may have been my personal passport but I suspect many of us arrive at this strange place by different roads. Illness. Burnout. Climate breakdown. Pandemics. Break ups. Babies. Jobs lost to AI. Grief. For so many different reasons, the life that made perfect sense yesterday suddenly doesn't.

Like many people in their thirties, I had reached the point where I was ready to build rather than roam. I had decided it was time to ‘crack on with the next chapter’, which I still hope involves romantic partnership, financial abundance, health, home, creativity and stability. Up until now, I’ve assumed that these things would click into place if I simply applied the same determination I'd brought to everything else. Throw absolutely everything you’ve got at it and it will all just come together, like planning the perfect trip.

I hadn’t reckoned on quite so many months spent with a mind like cotton wool, watching the leaves shift in my mother’s garden. It makes me wonder how much of life is about ‘making stuff happen’ and how much is about allowing them to happen and noticing them as they do? 

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In his new book Liturgies of the Wild, Devon-based storyteller and mystic Martin Shaw analyses the colours that repeatedly show up in myth: red, black and white. He writes about them far more epically than I ever could but in essence they symbolise something like this…

Red – is generally associated with youthful ambition. This is what makes our hero set off on their journey. It’s a fallible stage beset by frequent challenges but it’s also exciting. We wrestle the dragons, we reach a little further, climb the next mountain and one day, one day… In a word, it can be understood as spirit.

Black – this tends to crop up for most people toward mid life, when the road has got rather tangled or disappeared altogether. Whether financial ruin, illness or divorce, this humbling experience undermines their identity. It’s essentially a journey into the Underworld. Those lucky enough to return come back more empathetic but forever changed. In a word, it can be summed up as soul.

White – the colour that holds all others within it, is associated with elderhood. The person wearing white has already fulfilled whatever they came here to do and is brimming over with the skills to help others along their path. Despite Western culture’s fear of aging, it's an aspirational place to be. The word that encapsulates it is wisdom.

Although I hope I’m some years off the middle of my life, having spent so much time firmly in the red, this illness feels like my first glimpse of the black. 

I’m not in the burning pits – far from it – but the road I was following seems to have run out quite suddenly. Aware that I probably won’t find the way by looking in the same places I always have, I am unsure what is being asked of me. Let me at the dragon, tell me the sphinx’s riddle! Instead, I find myself sleepwalking through the Shadowlands, unsure where to find the bridge that leads back to the light.

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Many of you have subscribed because you love travel and are being blown down the great highway. I send you all the luck and love in the world. Speaking as someone who is currently living like an 80 year old, it really is true what they say about memories being the most precious thing. Fill your back pack with enough for countless buffets – you never know when you’ll need to live off that feast.

However, I have a feeling that this newsletter isn’t really about that kind of travel anymore. I guess I am currently writing for anyone who finds themselves at one of life's border crossings: the place where the old map no longer works but the new one hasn't appeared yet. 

If I had the energy to rebrand, I’d probably call it The Departure Lounge. But maybe Hi Horizon still works. For the horizon glimpsed from the Shadowlands is a horizon too, albeit one that’s less immediately sexy than boarding a plane. 

It isn’t particularly the story I want to write but you’re welcome to wander this unfamiliar territory with me. 

Love

Imogen x

PS In my most hopeful moments I don't feel like life is happening to us or even for us. It is happening with us.

In the end, there are so many ways to be alive. We just have to keep showing up. 

July wayfinding: provisions for the month to come

Reading This summer I am planning on working my way through Martin Shaw’s books which are imbued with primal wisdom and sentences to savour like the first bilberries on Dartmoor. For light relief, I always turn to the wry works of Dorothy Whipple, an early 20th-century writer who was largely overlooked in her lifetime because her novels focus on women trapped in quiet domesticity.

Inspiring Some people are just channels for creative energy and my friend Amy is one of them. She has been sharing daily collage art and poetry over at The Tender Letters on Instagram for 85 days in a row so far and her audience has soared to more than 16,000 in that time.

Listening A satisfied mind by Bon Iver was made for soft, slow summer afternoons 

Of course, you can always buy my book

 The Ethical Traveller: 100 Ways To Roam The World Without Ruining It