Just last week I sat on the banks of the Tennessee River and imagined how this body of water must have looked to my ancestors and to the grandfather I never met. Having been born and raised in Tennessee, he must have spent many hours gazing upon this very same river.  He must have known the names of the trees and the birds and the flowers that surrounded it. How many sunrises and sunsets did he see here before he went on an adventure in 1901 as a young Marine assigned to teach school 8,500 miles away on Guam, a little speck in the Pacific Ocean due south of Japan, north of New Guinea, west of Hawaii, and east of the Philippines?  How could he have imagined the wondrous life he would find or that he would fall in love with a young native girl, marry and raise seven children (one of whom was my father), and spend the rest of his adult life (nearly 40 years) in an idyllic paradise until the Japanese occupied the island during World War II.  He died in a prison camp in Japan -- never to return to his place of birth or the island he loved.

I am awed at the synchronicity of events that now bring me on a regular basis over the Pacific Ocean and across the U.S. Mainland to my grandfather’s homeland.  Unlike his, my journey is via jet and automobile rather than train and ship and it takes me only a couple of days rather than months and months. As consultant for Focus Healthcare’s residential treatment Center for Eating Disorders in Chattanooga and their intensive outpatient program, Moonpointe, in Knoxville, I now make several trips a year to a place that had only been a “once upon a time ... far, far away” image in my mind’s eye when -- as a child growing up on Guam -- I was told stories about my ancestral lineage from Tennessee.

Today I feel privileged to work with women with eating disorders who display the kind of courage it must have taken my grandfather to travel so far away from home and all that was familiar. For most of these women this is not a geographical journey to be measured in miles, but rather an inner pilgrimage into the depths of their psyches to find freedom from struggles with food, fat, and dieting, and ultimately to find themselves.  They, too, have had to find the strength to quiet the voices of fear long enough so they could listen to that faint voice calling them to venture forth into unknown territory;  to find the courage to move towards a life yet unseen but one waiting to be filled with love, peace, and joy.  A life beyond their wildest dreams!  And I feel honored to work with several amazing teams of eating disorder professionals who have signed up to be their guides as they make their way across an inner space that must seem as vast and daunting as the Continental US and the Pacific Ocean was to my grandfather.