here.

I have just returned from my adventuring home trip, five weeks in the lush Pacific Northwest; fully loosing myself in the serene wilderness that I unknowingly took for granted in my youth.  Mountains dressed in green shelter the horizon, making a myth of its expanse.  I set my senses free, hoping they would return to me having absorbed enough of these wilds to keep me brimming long after I departed from them.

I cried during our final decent into Chicago; looking out over the flat upon flat expanse of flat land.  Where were my brimming buckets of natural beauty, the ones I stowed and stashed in suitcase and heart, mind, body and soul; how could I lose my fullness so quickly? 

About three days after returning, I found, while raking the planting beds at the front of my house, the first evidence of spring’s new green; the tiny clustered heads of Sedum pushing up through still defrosting ground.  So recently was this landscape frozen that a patch of ice accompanied them. 

It was in this moment that my buckets began rushing over again.  All of the mountainous beauty in the world could not compare with the wondrous bravery of this new growth, a tiny microcosm of the universe brimming with as much life as any lush enveloping forest of endless green.

And then I knew.  It was not the mountains that made me whole, but my seeing of them.  It was not the flatlands that made me cry but my fear, fear that I would lose the wholeness that I had found.  But alas, it is here, the here that is everyplace we stand, if only we allow ourselves to be there.  

With gratitude,
Joanna