Coming Home

I can feel the quiet seep into my bones, muscles aching from a day in trains and buses and planes and shuttles and cabs. The damp green smell of the woods and earth, the light shining on the porch to greet me. I climb the stairs to my room as the house sleeps. Six weeks isn’t long but long enough to forget details and invent a whole other life. I hadn’t thought about my room in weeks, about the driftwood whales and shells on an alter and the tree that scratches hello at my window that had green leaves and whispered of summer when I left and is now an orchestra of brown pods shaking in the autumnal wind. But in the night I couldn’t even see the tree. 

In my big bed I dream of orcas. It was if they were welcoming me back to the northwest, reminding me of my place and my blessed vulnerability when I float quiet and still, orca jaws rubbing and nipping at my side. They swim in the wide deep expanses that consume my mind with shadows and multi-toned movement, consume this land and create a shore licked with cold salty tongues.

I wake to soft conversations and the smell of onions and eggs in hot oil. I shake free of fins and waves. I stare at the trees outside until I throw off the quilts and stretch in the coolness of my room. The smell of cooking mingles with coffee and fades. The conversations below cease as days in the wider world begin, doors open and shut, I imagine boots slipped quietly onto wool-socked feet. I walk onto the landing and catch my breath at the outer beauty of the old barn in the soft gray of a cloudy morning. All I can hear are frogs and birds and a brushing of motion that could be tree or car or water but I cannot tell and do not need to know. 

Downstairs a guitar rests upon a wall as if ready to be picked up and strummed, an avocado sits half eaten on the counter, coffee is still warm in the press. Signs of life and simplicity that I have missed. Tables tumble forth with eggplant and onions, apples and garlic. The abundance of this place! I can’t help but smile as I brew my tea and suddenly hear the songs and words that have been stoppered by city fences break lose into the foreground of my mind. Oh that’s right. They need space, too. The space I had briefly forgotten exists, like the spiderwebbed cracks in the wall of my room. It is like waking up from a dream with the relief and knowing that even if both worlds are real (orcas (taxi cabs? A city life?) nipping at your heart), this is the one that feels good and true and alive.   

This is the Home I have missed and craved and fear and love. And now all I have to do is actually Be Here. That’s all. And that is simply the most difficult part for me. I am slowly realizing that my success lay not in the achievement of some outwardly goal like the city (entrenched in my brain) wants me to believe, wants me to stay busy running after, but in the act of allowing myself to Be Here Right Now. 
This is what the space allows. This is my challenge of finding Home. Finding me. 

I melt into the quiet as the fog lifts and I breathe in the Now, sigh out the Then.

And breathe in again.