A long time.

(This post was started in June. I picked it up again in July, and now in August.)

Hello. It’s nice to see you. I’ve really missed you.

I have taken over a year off from this blog and nearly as long from my Instagram and Facebooks accounts, but it hasn’t been easy–not by a long shot. I have missed putting words together this way. I miss the way a blog works–it’s like a journal but you push publish and it goes live and is shared and maybe just maybe it’s a way to support and inspire and connect people. I love that.

Given that so much time has passed, I have lots to tell you.

First, the big news: We moved. We no longer live in our wonderful old island farmhouse. We did not sell it. And while our new adventures have been the right thing for us, it has also been tough. Some homes dig deep into your heart and stay there; that’s what our house did to mine. I miss our home and our rolling green land in ways that change daily.

One of my big lessons is to work on being able to let go of the past and live in the present. It’s a process, for sure.

Leaving our home was hard. I miss it. Today, I felt a deep longing for late spring birdsong and blooming roses on their vines, their bright petals hiding intense thorns–big real-time reminders of what it feels to be wildly alive. I miss the hawk couple returning to their nest and circling the valley while they hatch another family of babies and watch over them with their characteristic dedication. I miss our home which we restored with dreams and hard work. The importance of “home” is different for everyone. For me, our property is a special place that lives through an annual cycle of growth and death and rebirth dictated by the seasons, and I just love that cycle…It’s powerful and lovely in its utter simplicity.

This morning as I awoke in our home abroad, I closed my eyes and imagined opening our gate on our island, walking down the front path, opening the front door, walking inside our house, hanging my bag on the coat rack, and going to the kitchen to fetch a basket and scissors before wandering outside to clip kale and wild nettle, green onion and thyme, a bouquet of rosemary, a bundle of perfumed roses and lavender, feeling myself alive in the heady awareness of all of my senses brought to keen awareness.

I miss our old farmhouse like a person I long to hug. Do you know what I mean? Have you ever loved a place in a way that feels so tangible?

If I think about it welcoming other visitors and enriching their lives, I feel better. Our house feels like a living entity, loving the people who visit it with dedication and calm.

I still imagine that one day far in the future Brian and I will sit on our old deck holding hands and sipping lemonade at the end of a hot summer day, watching the grainy strands of meadowlands and wheatfields dance beneath our island’s wild sunsets. I still imagine that I will rise each day with delight about seeing a new angle of Blakely Harbor on a walk with a friend, searching for eagles in the sky. I still imagine that I will race shrieking into the Sound and sink to the bottom of the sea and rise covered in streaks of green seaweed. I still think that the moon jellies of the sea carry my heart in them, a marching army of immortals forever.

Meanwhile, we now live on a different continent. The funny thing is that I imagined announcing this very thing years and years ago–a thing I would say with excitement and thrill. I do feel that. But I also feel a retired sadness for what we left behind. Life is like that I guess…Full of beauty and surprises and also disappointments and tragedies. I haven’t figured out how to metabolize them yet. But I will. It’s a process. Life is about growing–sometimes going dormant for awhile, but always growing.

More soon.

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