Taking Flight
My footsteps echo on my living room tile floor without the furniture absorbing the clicking of my shoes. Piles of paper scraps procrastinated from over the last ten months move across my dining table into file folders, the recycling bin, or stuffed into a basket for keeping until some later date to deal with. This process of packing away, then unboxing upon my return, continues to be cathartic. Yearly purging decreases my list of material necessities, but I’m still amazed at what we all carry with us through life.
Here, for instance, is a notebook with scribblings from last October’s Literary festival in Brattleboro, Vermont—authors’ spoken gems that moved me to jot the words down. I can’t even remember which author quoted James Baldwin, “You don’t have a home until you leave it, and then when you have left it, you can never go back.”
Is that what has happened since I first left in September 2014?
Another note on the paper: “..how can one arrive if always holding the return…?”
The writer Carolyn Fourche, from a festival lectern, offered the idea of “re-discovering” daily, rather than reiterating, what already exists in the world. But, in my world, we’re taught to put down roots- in a place, with others, with family, in a job. But what if that life is not nourishing for someone like me? Or not anymore?
Recently, I’ve heard my voice again, “…take back your body, your attitude, your vulnerable caution…” The syllables seeped up through my pores one day a couple of weeks ago. I'm tired of the living in the aftermath of my car accident from January of 2017 in California. Yes, I thought, take it all back home—into that Capricorn-core rooting me, wherever I move about the planet.
The nomadic life has softened my shoulders and neck, strengthened my backbone, honed my senses. Doors have opened, not from within the rooms of physical structures, but from within my heart. I've existed within the juxtaposition of presence and witness while traveling.
I want to continue to kneel on the ground, not in prayer, or maybe in a type of prayer, to be able to understand what the breeze feels like on the grass blade. Or the blade as it sways in the breeze. Or the sunlight dappling along the edge of the blade as the breeze shifts the shadows. I want this without the distraction of house repair, work related phone calls, and bills.
I want to know who I am when I am not carrying around my history, and also when I am carrying it. I want to watch, from a mountain peak, what has dried up in me float away on a thermal up close with red tailed hawks. I want to, once again, be held in the arms of strangers on tango floors wherever I go, or move without reservation in front of a zydeco band. I want to feel ageless, and yet feel my age.
And so, “home” has become “leaning” into a way of life, as I blow from place to place and find my root again and again.
Yes, I have “left” to find myself twice now. And because I left it fully, I can never return to this stationary one in the ways I have known it so far. Baldwin was right.
This morning, I watched a young and frisky fox skip around the outside of my house. It stopped to chew on a clump of grass before bounding up into the woods to the east. The blue heron that visits my wetland pond turned its beak in my direction as I gazed at it through my living room window. Maybe it saw me, or just saw the reflections of tree and sky on the glass. This is my home, and yet, not my home. It belongs to them, too—the wild creatures. As I, with my need for the wild, belong everywhere I choose to roam.
My renters will move in on June 30th and I will have already departed. I will have left them a small vase of my summer blooms from my perennial gardens, as well as a color-penciled “welcome” note. I will have finished my list of responsibilities to my time spent here this past year, will have filled the gas tank in my truck, will have shared dinner with area friends another time. I will have allowed my wanderlust to take flight into another unknown adventure.
First destination? Maine......stay tuned.