04.27.13

“(n) a place from which one’s strength is drawn, where one feels at home; the place where you are your most authentic self.”  (Otherwordly Blog).

Home at last.  It was wonderful to see friends and family and to walk along the Pacific Ocean in the warm California sunshine.  But it is good to be home–like everybody always says.  I read in a Naomi Shihab Nye poem that it’s traditional in the old country, whenever you travel, to carry a living plant from home to help keep you rooted.

Maybe that’s what I need to do in the future to keep me tethered and help with my longing for home.   Here, I am rooted to the day, to time, to the changing quality of light out my windows as the hours go by.  I feel part of the daily orbit earth makes around the sun, starting with the hazy blue light at dawn and the honking geese nesting down south at old Hamm’s place, to all the robins now in the woods.  I know that the sun will have crested the hill behind our house about 9:30 a.m. this time of year,  and it will sparkle off the chrome bridge faucet at the kitchen sink.  At mid-day, it seems like the earth stops her orbit for a bit and time comes to a halt.  The light is bright and flat and it’s very still.  Then the long afternoon begins, finally warming enough to go out and sit on the warm rocks at water’s edge, listen for loons, pet the warm fur of the kitties.  There is an everlasting setting of the sun, even now, two months before the Summer Solstice, and dinner time gets later and later.  I often go to sleep by watching the remaining sunset glow slip down the golden fir wainscoting on our bedroom walls.

When I am home, i feel like I’m in the classic children’s drawing where they make stick figures  circle around a globe, to illustrate that there are all kinds of people living around the world.  Even when I am upside down, like they draw the people,  I’m stuck to the earth as she spins.   I am part of it, grounded and rooted.  “There’s no place like home.”  Indeed, Dorothy.