The point is to make intimate contact with the real world, the real self. Sacred refers to that which takes us out of our little selves into the whole mountains-and-rivers mandala universe...nature is not a place to visit, it is home."---Gary Snyder 

Here's the first category of entries for the Where's Home? exercise.  In this, the first of 4 posts, please take your time (you'll need a big mug of your favorite tea!) and find submissions from Roxanne Foxx, Holly Holbrooks-Kuratek, Dave Pollard, Karen Crone, Liz Seymour, Helen Darmara, Toni Ryan, Darcy Gilbert,  Barb Torke, Julia Harris and Jena Strong.  Thank each of you for participating!  I named this category of entries: 'Where's Home?: The question is fundamentally unanswerable'  

I hope you find the strands that weave these posts together sweetly compelling. Please feel free to post your comments and let us know what you find in the exploration.

And the 2 winners of this category are: Jena Strong and Barb Torke. They will get heirloom wildflowers just for the places they call home: Burlington, Vermont and Cedaredge, Colorado.  All are excellent submissions--these two touched my heart for some inexplicable reason.  They made me feel home. Congratulations Jena and Barb! 

Special thanks to Patti Digh, Dave Pollard, Carl McColman, Julia Harris, Karen Crone, Gayle Roberts, Ella Moss  and any others who posted a link or article to their blogs to help promote this exercise.

Tomorrow's post, 2nd in the series : 'Where's Home?: Home is a Place'

 Roxanne Foxx, Marion, Ohio

The place I call home is a place that I could never turn away from; the eternal places where nature is free from most humans. My home is a place that I can be no matter where I may seem to wander, as I don't see a reason to stray from the only place in nature others have not touched. I keep in mind that I do not tamper with what the Goddess has placed, and I enjoy learning from the trees that seem massive to my body. I cannot begin to explain the beauty, and most of you already know this. You can take a picture of your home and say 'Here's my home.' I'd much rather be able to be where my home is. There is no point in letting the things we love go without a reason.

Under the moonlight my home is magnificent, and the water reflects the moon's face on its ever-loving tranquil streams. Love is reflected off its face without a care, and it feels as if she’s watching over us who never seem to forget our correct place, even though in this day sometimes it’s easy to forget who you are at heart. No matter where you go, or where I go, my home is where ever the wind takes me, and it’s always changing to different places. No place can be called home except the places we never can forget; and the places we never forget can’t really be called home. So there is no answer from my end in this. But, everything is a home, and everything is yet not a home. It just goes to show, you can’t claim a place as home without thinking of another place entirely.

Holly Holbrooks-Kuratek, Bend, Oregon   Holly is a blogger on the Virtual Tea House.  She wrote this on her way to her ancestral homeland, Scotland.  She starts medical school in Madison, Wisconsin in the fall.

I've lived in 10 places in 10 years, since moving out of my parents' house. I have lived in a cockroach-infested basement, a room in a frat house, my sister's living room (kitchen), a pre-war building with brass things and ghosts, and a ranch. As a composite, they paint a picture of home-making. I've gotten really good at settling in for a little while. The same few pictures have hung on many walls.

I still sometimes consider my parents' house to be home, especially when I'm sick or really broke and in need of chicken soup (for either of these reasons). But lately this place has felt less and less like Home with a capital H. It can no longer substitute for the home I long to create for myself. If home means continuous presence in a house, I'm years away from it. I have found that in order to be happy, I am continually redefining those things I most deeply want.

This year, the ranch where I've been living has been my home, more than any other place. But in one month I'll be moving to Madison, Wisconsin. So is home, then, 322 North Meadow Lane, where two strangers await me? I feel this place can become home, but it isn't yet. Maybe regardless of where the winds blow me, until I land and take root, home is wherever my friends and family are. If so, I have a hundred homes. Which can feel like nowhere at all.

Right now I am writing from my sister's place in Oakland, California. A home she has made with her love and their 6 cat and rabbit babies. This is a home. But even when I squint my eyes real hard, it's still her home, not mine. Yesterday, I spent the afternoon with my friend and her 5 month old baby boy, adopted on day 6 of life from a woman who hadn't known he was coming, who never had the chance to ready a home for him, in her house or in her heart. Now he's got two loving moms who waited for him, and a warm house full of sun and jazz music. That is a home. These are homes because of the people in them. But if home were parenthood, or partnership, I would surely be homeless. I feel this way some times, but I would rather not. So I'll just have to keep redefining home.

Tomorrow I'm flying to Scotland. We're visiting my great-grandmother's birthplace, a place called Motherwell. My grandma has never been to Scotland, but if you opened up her heart and looked inside, it would be full of bagpipes and thistle pins, old dusty photos and stories of her family's immigrant struggles. This is where our ancestors dwell, and I imagine that she will be moved to tears many times each day we are there. It is her homeland. But it is not home. Her home is in Burlingame, California, where she raised her two daughters and her grandchildren, and has shopped at the same Long's Drugs for decades. In 20 years she has lived in two adjacent apartments. #10 while my grandfather was alive and, after he passed away, #11.

My grandmother is my first and longest-living memory. She coached my birth and helped bring me home from the hospital. She played dad because he couldn't. 27 years ago, her home was my first home. This is where I go in my mind to get grounded, to remember who I am when I fear I am losing me.

I am 3 years old and 3 feet tall. A world of matching sweatsuits and corduroy pants, naps on Hollie Hobbie sheets, temper tantrums on shag carpet.  I am padding barefoot in the tiny backyard garden through tomato plants, under holly trees. I am practicing hand stands in front of the wood paneled TV. I am chewing absentmindedly on the edge of the flowered couch, playing with my toes on the linoleum kitchen floor. I am spending lazy weekends in a garage full of cigarette smoke, gasoline, oil paints and old dusty grandfather things.

I have not been there in 20 years, but I carry it inside me, along with everything else I need. Until I find the place, and perhaps the person, at whose doorstep I can put it all down. I don't want to borrow a sense of home. I don't want to visit it, envy it, or sign its lease. I want to own it, forever, and be owned by it. Yes, this is exactly what I want.
So at this very moment, home is this body and brain of mine, the only place in which I can claim permanent residence and sole ownership- though, at times, I have wanted nothing more than to move out. My red hair, my big toes, my pink shoulder mole. I will never paint over these things, or take them to the Goodwill. The emptinesses and fullnesses in my mind, the infant memories, my fears of the future. It's all in here, and it's not going anywhere. I am home because I am home.

Dave Pollard, somewhere in the wetlands northwest of Toronto, Canada

NOTE: Dave is host of "How to Save the World". a salon of environmental philosophy, creativity, business papers and essays--all focused on a better understanding of how the world really works!  Dave supported the 'Where's Home' exercise with this and several other posts that followed it.

My friend Patti Digh pointed me yesterday to an exercise proffered by Beth Patterson, to write an essay of no more than 750 words that answers the question: Where is home, to you? 

I have written articles all around this question, from my long, ponderous article about The Importance of Place and my lament that we are all Homeless and Addicted, to my review of Melissa Holbrook Pierson's book The Place You Love is Gone ("we are a generation weighed down by a sadness we don't know we feel") and my more recent Big Question: Where Do I Belong?

Home is the place where you are yourself, the place you were meant to be who you were meant to be.

I have often thought I knew where my home was. Places of shelter, wild places, rainforests, warm, inviting places, places untouched by human construction or alteration. Places that called to me, welcomed me, enfolded me in their embrace. Places I just felt, instinctively, that I belonged. That I was a part of, not apart from, connected to everything in that place and though it to all-life-on-Earth.

I sympathize with the Procol Harum song whose protagonist sought to explore the world but at every turn "only saw how far he was from home". For some, the fearful, home is the only place we are not afraid.
While I sense, instinctively, that the definition of home above, in italics, is correct, I am still not quite sure what it means.

For most of us, including me, I have never found a place where I am myself, perhaps because I am not yet sure who that self is, or is meant to be. At least not in the nobody-but-yourself ee cummings sense. I have argued that the work we are meant to do is that which lies at the sweet spot where your Gifts (what you do uniquely well), your Passions (what you love doing) and your Purpose (what greatly needs doing, that you care to do) intersect. I have called such work Natural Enterprise and although it is rare it is magic.

Perhaps, by analogy, home, the place we are meant to be, lies at the sweet spot where our Capacities (what we offer to place and community, what we are good at being), our Joys (what fills us with love and happiness in a place and community, what we love being), and our Intention (what we need ourselves to be, and others need us to be). That is, perhaps, our place -- not our place to do, but our place to be, the place where we be-long. When we have found our place, is that place our home, our Natural Community?

The challenge here is not only discovering such a place in this staggeringly complex world, it's knowing ourselves -- most of us, I suspect, don't really know our capacities, what we're capable of, or what we really love being, if we've only experienced being a few different things in a few different places. We probably don't know what we need ourselves to be, unless we've been really tested, and what others need us to be depends on their own ever-changing circumstances, and how those many 'others' revolve, as they will, in and out of our lives.

I wonder if this challenge is not due, for the most part, to having so many choices. In indigenous communities, and among wild creatures, there are fewer different capacities that can be developed, fewer capacities in demand, fewer different ways to find love and fewer people to find it with. There is less opportunity to visit or learn about other places, so one's search is limited to what is at hand or described by those one encounters personally. And there is more time to reflect, to ponder one's options, to learn who one really is, and less cultural indoctrination (necessary in modern civilization to keep us in order in our horrifically overcrowded world) to become everybody-else.
We have become so used to defining ourselves by what we do, that we often cease to distinguish that from who we are.

My Gifts include imagining and provoking; that is what I do uniquely well. But what am I uniquely good at being? What reflective (as opposed to active) capacity defines me, comprises my unique offering to my place, wherever that may be?

My Passions include writing and working collaboratively on complex problems; these are things I love doing. But what do I most love being, that might help me identify my place, the place where I can be this?
My Purpose, what I am needed to do, is to enable people to change themselves for the better. But what do people (people in my community, people I love) need me to be? And how can I be more completely and authentically nobody-but-myself?

Home is the place that realizes these three 'existentials': It is where one can be what one is good at being, where one can be what one loves being, and where one can be what one is needed to be. The ducklings in the photo above, studied so carefully by biologist Bernd Heinrich, will know their home instinctively, even though it will change (from wetland to meadow to tundra, in cycles) many times throughout their lives. Each time they will migrate home as precisely and unhesitantly as a guided missile. They know where is home, for them.

For us, discovery of home is harder. It requires us to know who we are. When we became disconnected from all-life-on-Earth, and preoccupied with what we had to do, and began living inside our heads, we forgot who we were. Until we remember, we will never know where is home, for us.

Karen Crone, somewhere smack dab between Chicago and Milwaukee! The second part of her entry is pasted from  37 Days Facebook dialogue; the first part is from Karen's entry, posted on her website, 'my everyday memoir'.  [Note: In the second section Karen is referring to Dave Pollard's piece on 'Where's Home?' above.]

1996 DJ James

HOME
It’s when you are five and it’s bedtime and you ask
Daddy what if I get lost or stolen by a monster-man
and Dad pulls the blankets to your chin and says
know this: if you are ever lost I will search for you
and I will never stop if it takes my whole life
I won’t ever give up. And it is simple for you
to believe because he is so big and you are small
a piece of him he’d come for like Helen of Troy.

It struck me that when you consider Dave’s suggestion that we must find a place where our Gifts and Passions and Purpose intersect to find home, home is maybe a place that we, most of us, haven’t arrived at yet. This is not a fresh concept, I’m aware. Indeed those of us who read Patti’s blog or enjoy your Virtual Tea House, we are on a spiritual journey. We know this. I guess I just thought, lying here under my comforter with my laptop snuggled close and my warm mug in my hand, I guess I was thinking I was home. But, I admit, I wasn’t working very hard.

From there, from the idea that we are on a path to home, I couldn’t stop thinking about Erickson’s developmental stages (forgive me; I know it is a little mundane, but that is where I went). It was more this general idea that we have tasks to accomplish, destinations to achieve, in every stage of life. If we don’t get there, we are in crisis. We are lost on the way.

I got to wondering, what is “home” to my five year old, who is not yet realizing his passions and purpose?  He is full of peace so much of the time. He seems more at home than me.  It felt to me as though Dave was alluding to the concept of self-transcendence. And I found myself nodding as I read, thinking that with transcendence would come peace, and peace is what we want for home. However, I was conflicted at a couple of places. First, while Dave alluded to the importance of relationships with others, I would have loved to hear him explore that further. How do our connections to loved ones factor in? Can we be home without being connected? And finally, this journey, this work of finding out and then becoming who we are meant to be… are we really not home until then? Is there no respite along the way, and might those places of peace be home as well? 

Liz Seymour

What a wonderful topic to ponder!  I find myself often thinking not only about what is home, but what is homelessness.  Through volunteering with Food Not Bombs I've become friends with a number of homeless people who are quick to correct me when I use that word--they say "I'm houseless, not homeless."   I now know that home can be under a bridge or a tent hidden in a patch of woods.  I also am beginning to understand the corollary--that it's possible to live in a very comfortable house but not be at home.

Helen Darmara, home safe in Maine [Note: even though this essay seems to be about 'home as place' it's actually about more than that, which is why it ended up in this category.]

I grew up feeling not very safe. I don’t know why; I wasn’t spanked (much), I wasn’t yelled at (much), I wasn’t criticized (much), I was ‘the favorite’ and I thought I had to be perfect. Probably those last two had something to do with the tip-tilting world I lived in. I learned to bite back my words until I no longer had those thoughts, I learned to hear the anger rising in someone’s voice and head out (or tune out), I learned to smile and say, “that’s nice.”

As an adult, I was hypnotized for stress relief. The hypnotist told me to envision a place I was safe, where I was happy, where I was supported. When he woke me, I could still see the place and myself in it: a little girl, in a white cotton dress, with a wolf on each side, looking out of the woods into a field. I was the little child in The Peaceable Kingdom.

When I was 53, I found those woods, I found that field.

My husband and I were living with our three teenaged sons in Houston, Texas. Big air conditioned house, a swimming pool that was too hot to swim in in the summer, someone to clean, someone to mow, someone to clean that hot pool. He was beginning to think about retirement, I was beginning to think how empty the nest was about to become. Since our children are only two years apart (twins plus one), it seemed they would all leave at once.

Where would we live? Houston was a place where we perched. For the kids, it was home, for the adults, it was marking time until we could move back where we belonged. But where was that? I’d grown up in central New York State, gone to school in Vermont, college in Ohio. He’d grown up in Washington, DC, where we met, gone to school in Massachusetts, college in Connecticut. We’d lived in Virginia as a family, but after ten years away, we didn’t want to move back to the over development of the DC suburbs. We’d vacationed in Florida and Maine and Connecticut; Florida was too hot, he thought Maine too remote, Connecticut would be just right. I smiled and said, “Connecticut is nice,” trying to figure out why I so desperately wanted to be somewhere else.

So we set a budget and we looked in Connecticut and we found a little house in the woods that had been put on the market the day we drove past it on our way to the friends we were visiting. It was not only within our budget, it was half what we expected to have to pay. He flew back to Houston; I drove up to visit friends in Maine. As I drove across the Piscataquis River bridge that separates Maine and New Hampshire, Etta James began to sing, “At Last.” I was home, but I couldn’t say, “I can’t live in Connecticut.”

There was a little house on the coast for sale near our friends that fit within the rest of the budget. “Could we have a summer place? It’s only five hours between the two, that’s an easy drive.” We could, we did. When we moved away from Houston, we split everything between the two houses: the main house in Connecticut, the little house in Maine. I drove back and forth, spending more and more time in Maine, watching the tide ebb and flow in the cove, watching the grass turn gold in the field next to the woods. Just as I began to feel I could use some company, my husband came up from Connecticut and asked for a divorce.

So now I live in my little house in Maine, with the woods behind me, the fields beside me, the water in front of me and the sky all around. I am home.

Words and images © 2008 H. C. Darmara  All rights reserved

Both photos in this essay are views from Helen's home.

Toni Ryan, currently of Bend, Oregon soon to be from somewhere else in the world

I love the invitation to write about home, especially this month as I ponder what to do with my house that has been my home for the past four years. It is the first house I’ve purchased on my own and I quickly set out to fill it with all my favorite things. The first purchase was a green porch swing, just like my grandmother had in Quincy, Ohio. Her house was the epitome of home-a big front porch with a (peeling paint) swing that would always bang into the windows. There were two beautiful maple trees in the front yard that produced volumes of leaves to play with in the fall. It felt like her house had always been there and always would be there. Like I imagine all grandmothers must have, there were lace doilies on the furniture, dinner was served on real china, and the big claw foot tub had the softest water imaginable. There were rhubarb and grapes growing in the backyard which went on and on, surrounded by trees.

Another gift I indulged in with my new home was a gooseneck kitchen faucet, just like the one we had in Germany. When I was 12, my father’s job took him to West Germany where we lived in a 100 year old house that looked like a castle. I had my own bedroom with a canopy bed and its own sink, quite the luxury in a family of five children. My favorite place was the sun room that had a goldfish pond inside, with windows on three sides and French doors coming off the dining room. There were two huge evergreen trees on the back of the property that formed a private enclosure that was the tree fort. Inside were two platforms placed way up high in the trees. My sister and I would have picnics and glorious times sitting in the trees, far away from the rest of the world.

My new house became my home when my daughter returned from college the year I bought it. Unfortunately, she came home as she was sick and had a hard winter recovering. But having her live with me again in this new place made it a real home and filled the emptiness in my heart leftover from my divorce. The following spring she met the love of her life, went on to graduate college, get married, and have a baby-sweet Avery, almost a year old.

I was better equipped this time for my daughter to find her own life. When she first went away to college, I missed her terribly.

To further make this my home, it needed a dog. Growing up my family had shaggy dogs. First we had Tramp, a loveable poodle mix. Bummer, a bearded collie/poodle mix, joined my family in Germany and was my best friend and confidante through high school years. Through the Bearded Collie Rescue program, I found Farley, a beautiful fawn colored beardie. Farley has the sweetest disposition and is the most loyal companion. In thinking Farley needed company; we brought Banjo, a golden doodle puppy, into our lives. Farley and Banjo filled my house and life with great joy, companionship, and fun.

This week, my house goes on the market for sale. I’ve already taken down all the things that give the house any personality. Both the dogs have new families.

I sold the piano last week.

But all of the memories will stay with me forever. I find myself at home in the company of those I love and the fond recollection of times with those I have loved. Where’s home? Home is where the heart is. I know there will be signposts along the way that will always bring me back home, remembering and connecting. A swing, a faucet, and a shaggy dog helped me find my home. I know there is a new home for me to find. Somewhere between what was and what will be.

P.S. My mother lived in no less than 15 houses over her lifetime. Wherever she was, was home. She passed away last December. I know it will be harder for me to have that sense of being home without her to tell my stories to. I’m working hard to find home in her absence.

Darcy Gilbert, Bend, OR  Written while on a trip to the Highlands of Scotland

Home is where I wake, slip my feet into my blue boiled-wool slippers and shuffle into the room where my husband sits in the morning sun.  Home is the feel of his lips on mine and his loving routine of having the coffee made, with my favorite mug waiting next to the paper where I like to sit and greet the day. 
 

Home is the place I play with my friends, hooting through the woods on bikes, whooping through the snow on skis, gliding along long flat roads, careening along riverside trails.  Home is where I don't have to look at street signs, or figure out a subway system.  Home is where I have found the pockets of nature that feed my soul, and the friends that quench my thirst for connection.
 

And yet, as with other grand truths, the seeming opposite is also true.

Home is that place I land when I am alone, away from my familiar.  It is that emotional pair of boiled-wool slippers that I sink my feet into below the anxious mental chatter that seems to be an element of any great adventure where there is fear, uncertainty, exhilaration and brilliance.  Home is the ground when all is stripped away and I am naked in a world of new experience, feeling so alive and clear. 

So, the paradox of home: it can be both a seamless quilt of comforts, routines and community, and it can also be the simple connection of my feet to the ground and my soul to the mystery when I wander and seek adventure. 

Co-WINNER OF THIS CATEGORY: Barb Torke, Cedaredge, Colorado

I have two homes now. The town home is the gallery, where the tiny bungalow kept me safe while I waited for an age without sight. That time hasn’t come—yet, but I found that ‘home’ where I had friends, work, and a house. The home I treasured let the moonlight in, kept the cold out, and pushed the underground creek up into the cat tails by the shed. In town, near everything I needed, it made promises it has kept. Now I wander in the garden, pull a few weeds, and feel at home. I work in the studio. Doing my art is home. I teach classes. The classroom is home.

Yet I sleep in my home on Cedar Mesa. I pull weeds here, too. I fight an eternal war with grasshoppers and gnats for my pretties—my iris, my yarrow, my dianthus—my home. Many times I feel the breeze—or the wind—smell the lilacs, and touch the lamb’s ear. Here I listen to the wind sough through the pines, and listen to my lover’s voice. My life has always been so full of sight. Now I have a home that offers up the music of wind chimes and brass bells, the scent of sagebrush and pine sap. Here I sense music and aroma, touch rough bark and moving grasses, have a good stove, taste wine and herbs, see the San Juans, the mesa, the Uncompahgre plateau—a cacophony for all the senses.

I slip from world to world with these two homes. Homes I have lived with all hold indelible fondness for me. I remember Goodrich. I grew up in a big house on 160 acres. Where was my home there? In the house where we slept in the basement to keep cool in the summers? In the front room where my father slept in the afternoons after irrigating the fields during the night? Was it the fields of alfalfa or the meandering ‘ditch’ of seep water that passed through to the South Platte? I sometimes think it was and is all in my head and heart, even now.

As then I now see home as a large area of land. Home is a responsibility, much the same as the responsibility I take for my health, and my children. Recycle, grow organic, buy local, all these are responsibilities I take under my management. Yet I slip into the cocoon of home that sits below my breast bone. The home that holds a heart and lungs and mind is the micro-home. The macro-home is where I drift, remembering to brush my teeth, pay my bills, and endure. It can be anywhere. A sleeping bag on the mesa is a short term home. Cirque Soleil is a home the entertainers have built. Tai chi in the town park is home.

 
Rifle Falls Campground, Western Colorado

It is not easy being at home anywhere. Security was always my bugaboo, not only a secure place for me, but for my family. I struggle with relationships with people. Community disguises itself in control. Finding home in the community can lead us into guilt and shame, if we ask it too.

Hope and dependency make me scattered. I need a home that is now, here, where I can’t hope for anything better. Then it becomes a choice.

A rocking chair is constructed for dependence, and independence. Both are necessary to free the legs to move forward, and back. We depend on this. I will be dependent at some time. Now I will search the wind sounds, and the bee’s hum, for a dependence bundled inside independence. Independence is learned, recognized, honored, and coveted. My grandchildren now wrestle with home, and finding their home—in themselves and the world, like me, like everyone.

  
Home Tombow

I can depend on the world to move me through it on this journey. I will do it with as much independence as I can muster, choosing to live in the home I inhabit at any one time, and keeping the micro-home under my bony skeleton, stringy muscle, and inside these viscous fluids, safe and nurtured.

Julia Harris , also known as Sister Julia, thrives in Great Britain

There is something caught within beauty, as though it is trapped there, or I am trapped here, away from it. It silently sings and moves me with its stillness. The second I witness that something, I am home.

At the moment I am lucky, love and the summer have me open, home is everywhere and I can welcome people in constantly. Generosity comes from being home, authentic action comes from being home, and unconditional love springs abundantly from this space, clearing path after path to doors which had been blocked to me before. When I am home, the world is an easier place to live in, and sharing it with others is a doddle.

I am not home when things are too rushed, when I act as though there are more important things to attend to than my sense of peace and connectedness, when I allow myself to become one of my roles instead of fulfilling a role.  Both of these states are easily slipped into, but coming home takes a little mindful focus and its preciousness is balanced by the seeming un-importance of focusing in a dutiful life.
 

It's a good thing life is so beautiful.

Co-WINNER OF THIS CATEGORY:  
Jena Strong,  Burlington, Vermont

Late last night, the cat got herself all tangled up in a plastic shopping bag. She was completely panicked and thrashing about, but all we could hear were inexplicable thuds and crashes coming from the basement. Greg went down and saw what was happening, removed the butchered bag from around her paws, and watched her take off for upstairs, seemingly traumatized.

Pearl, too, did some thrashing this morning. I was attempting to change her diaper and get her dressed on my bed, where it seems most everything in our house happens (or doesn't happen, as the case may have been on a recent late-night near-miss occasion when a certain small person appeared in the darkness at an inopportune moment), and she was having none of it.

Instead, she was writhing, twisting, squirming and screaming, as I stubbornly wrestled and struggled and battled and fought with her determined little package.
Then she used a word. She used a word and she told me what she wanted.

"NAKED! NAKED! NAKED!"

"Oh, you want to be naked, Pearlie? OK. You can be naked."

And I tell you, her demeanor changed instantly. She stopped yelling. She stopped wriggling. She stopped resisting. And then she said, "Dressed, Mama," lying there compliantly and waiting for me to put on her diaper and clothes.

Oh, to be able to say what we want. And to be acknowledged, seen, and given permission to be exactly where we are, as we are, how we are, what we are, without demand or expectation; these change everything. Quite suddenly, we find ourselves yielding, considering the other side. We open. We soften. We exchange. We change.

Somehow old news like this becomes profound and simple and enlightening when the messenger is so new.
Motherhood: One minute I'm negotiating a midnight standoff with a 40-pound bed hijacker, and the next a two-year-old is teaching me the heart and soul and blood and bones of conflict resolution.

Today, our eight-year anniversary of moving to Burlington, Greg and I met up at noon and walked down to Waterfront Park. We walked slowly. We had planned on taking a lunchtime yoga class, but even that felt like a "should" when really what we needed was to do nothing together. So we walked on the bike path along the lake, we sat on a swinging bench and rocked, the cool air reminding us that spring is a long-time-coming in these parts, these parts that have become home, these parts where our babies were born, where we were in some ways born again, too.

Born again? Yes, me. Yes, him. We were not fully ourselves yet eight years ago, and yet we were as fully ourselves as we could have been on that May Day in 2000. Today, we are also as real, as complete, as ourselves as we know how to be. But I wonder, I am so curious to know, what will the next eight years hold? What will I look back on in 2016 (?!) and see as self-evident? It's like a story I can't wait to keep reading. Or writing.

My friend and inspirer Jennifer sent me a YouTube video last weekend of Steve Jobs giving a graduation speech at Stanford a few years ago. He spoke eloquently about connecting the dots, and how we can only do this looking back in time, not forward. We look back, and we see; we see the way the decisions fell into each other like nesting dolls, we see friendships we forged and others forgotten. My God, if I'm not careful, this post is going to become a graduation speech.

But looking ahead, we don't know. All we can do is be here, be aware, be awake to whatever is happening. And what's happening is that we are beginning to think about getting our bed back. We're marveling at the ways in which our kids are our teachers. We're emptying the dishwasher and we're loading the dishwasher and we're emptying our minds and we're loading up on faith, yet again, that things are as they should be, that everything's going to "work out" just fine if we keep going towards the light, keep coming out from beneath the shadows of fear and separation and judgment, keep knowing the Universe loves us, just freakin' loves us so much just as we love the children who weren't yet born, not even conceived, eight years ago.

This is all. This is where I am. This is where we are, walking together by the water, looking out at the soft grays so inviting over the mountains, feeling grateful, swinging on a bench, faces facing the strengthening sun, soaking it up, soaking it in, giving over to the dot we're in now, that which envelopes us, delivering news old and new this very moment, and this one, and this one, and this.