Welcome Back!!!

I left the vintage cookbooks where I found them, in a corner of the barn up in the country house.  And the half-finished quilt.  The gardening books.  And the evening murmur of crickets.

I come back from a world of deer at dawn and fields sprouting their second crop of hay, a family of loons that glide for hours on an unpeopled lake; days of picking up whatever poetry I found at hand, and blueberry-studded hills.

I am happy to be here!  Happy to share my life and thoughts again in this blog, and to re-engage with beloved fellow pilgrims on the journey.

I needed time to step beyond as many of the normal boxes that fill a busy life as I could, without harm or negligence.

I needed to break with my normal, in order to rediscover the ordinary.

At some point a year ago, I recognized in myself a turning.  It felt like restlessness, a sense that even the work that I loved was becoming clouded by too many layers, add-ons.  The yesses I’d said, when I wasn’t sure I meant them; the “okays” I agreed to, half-heartedly.  Zest and passion, and a deep-fed center had made way for a sense that my life needed a house cleaning.  I could look at a burnt match and feel a certain kinship.

Many years ago, a wise woman had said to me, “Never choose the good over the best.”

It was time to lower the volume, the speed, the juggling.

In his lovely essay collection, Consolations, the poet David Whyte writes that “withdrawal can be the very best way of stepping forward.”

He goes on, “So much of what we are involved with, in even the highest cause, becomes involvement at the busy periphery, where the central conversation has been lost to the outer edges of what was to begin with, a very simple central invitation.  Withdrawal is often not what it looks like – a disappearance – no, to withdraw from entanglement can be to appear again in the world in a very real way and begin the process of renewing the primary, essential invitation again.”

For the past few months, I’ve lived in such a way that I could stop what I was doing and fill the bird feeder when it was empty.  Have a spur-of-the-minute cup of tea with a friend, or a long-distance call with an old friend.  Stand in front of paintings at a museum, walk my town without hurry or agenda, read the paper, and take naps.  Discover new novels and poetry.  Attend to my loved ones with greater focus.

What do I bring back with me?  First, the hope that I can share what I gleaned along with the berries, what I dared within myself, or simply received, unearned. For, however perfectly one conceives a retreat, it is always the unearned discoveries that seem to strike deepest, take us beyond ourselves, and in the end return us to our deepest and clearest inner home.

I have learned that sabbaticals needn’t produce complete books or symphonies or even Big Decisions.  It is enough that they open the days to the ordinary grace that a life of hurry and over-commitment trample.

I bring maple syrup and a hand-made ceramic cup, a month’s worth of field notes, and the memory of deer.
As I was folding the table cloth and rinsing out the bright yellow pitcher that I used to hold flowers from the garden, the little trickster god of the Greek pantheon, came to mind.  Hermes was the trickster, but he was also the messenger.  The dual role seems so apt to me at this moment.  We need to be tricked, often, into pausing long enough to attend to the beauty right in front of us.  We need a messenger who can tell us what we need to know, even (or especially) when it is disguised.

Often depicted with wings, Hermes was a “liminal deity,” one of those who offered safe passage between the underworld and the world above – between the visible and the invisible realms.  How perfect, this inventor of the lyre, to be known as the god of transitions.

In ancient times, travelers would pile stones as markers at the mid-point between villages.  Each person who passed added a stone to these “hermas.”

To remember the value of trickster truths, messages from ordinary life that seem slight only when I am not really paying attention, the most meaningful thing that I carry back into my “normal” life is a field stone.  It reminds me of the sweet hours I spent overlooking a pond, listening to loons, and of the times when the waters were especially calm, and I was lucky enough to actually penetrate the surface, and there to spy what Whyte calls, “essential ground.”

Happy fall!