Homecoming

Home is a name, a word, it is a strong one; stronger than magician ever spoke, or spirit ever answered to, in the strongest conjuration.

 I am so sorry for the long absence.  We spent the holidays in Austin and were gone for nine days.  Then next week we worked more on the house and spent New Years Eve in a fancy condo in downtown Seattle with the voucher Dylan gets from his work.   And then it was back to work.  This month of January should be a bit trying as there is so much work on the house to be done yet and moving to be done at the same time. There is still three feet of snow at the land and it says there will be more all week.   What a winter to move!

Last week I set out for the land.  The roads were clear but there was a ton of snow on the ground.  Up ahead something stirred on the shoulder of the road and from the ditch flew a bald eagle so close to my car that I had to break a bit to be sure not to hit it.  A few minutes more up the road a mottled juvenile eagle flew overhead.  The last week we have seen so many eagles landing in our trees and flying overhead that we have quit keeping count.  I suppose that there increased presence is tied in some was to the massive amount of snow that  lays even on the valley floor.

 

It seems unbelievable in a way how at home I feel here and how my original home now seems foreign and strange.  I suppose trauma could have forced some loss of memory but I found myself in Austin a total stranger.  I never could tell where I was at, even the plants all seemed strange and unrecognizable, and I used to feel to confident in my ability to recognize the flora in central Texas.  The air was the  only thing that held any memories and luckily they were mostly pleasant.  The smell of BBQ mixed with the scent of the vaguely cool air of a 75 degree, overcast December day brought a flood of nostalgia.  The moist air at night, so heavy with water that you become damp on a though it is rainless, had me recalling nights of wandering down the pathways of my childhood land by full moon and by starlight.  But that was all that could still draw a memory for me.  What ever it was that held me there is long gone and I find myself here, in the wet Pacific North West.  I suppose there was a transfer of the emotional concept of home from Texas to here.  After all, when I was growing up in Texas all I did was daydream about the two years I spent living in the Seattle suburbs.  And now that I am here I feel inexplicably tied to this place.  Even the thrill of crossing the the Cascades and experiencing the dry air and ponderosa forests of the east side pales in comparison to the buzz in my body that I feel the minute I again see the overwhelmingly green forests and that first bit of mist in the air,  The trickling waterfall. 

I often had thought that I would move more.  I used to think New Mexico was calling me,  even when I was younger and living in Arizona I had thought that New Mexico would someday be my home.  But after spending a month there late last Spring,  I realized how much I needed water,  and not just a lone river that painfully makes it way down the high desert, sucked up at every chance.  I needed water that veritably bleeds from the ground. 

The animals became eager to explore more of the earth and wanted to leave the confines of the water, but the Ocean knew that the animals could not leave without her.  So the Ocean went with them.

Here,  there is water in the Ocean, only hours away,  the same water fills the lake like Puget Sound.   The Ocean gently shakes off bits of herself molecule by molecule and the sky eagerly collects all the pieces into clouds.    The mountains greedily hold the clouds here and pour the ocean down on the mountains and our faces.  The ocean water cum rain runs off these surfaces and fill rivulets, brooks, then streams, then rivers.  They flood over high rock cliffs and cut massive waterfalls into mountainsides.  The water runs in snake like streams off of melting glaciers and frozen ocean we call snow and fills enchanted alpine lakes that dot every bit of the Cascades.  And then this borrowed Ocean flows back out into the sound.  The Salmon know that all the water is the Ocean and they travel beyond its saltly limits back up these waterways and spawn and die.  They travel up the river by my land and thier bodies feed the eagles and the trees.  And all of creation is fed, like me, by water like that the Ocean so kindly pours upon my land freely.

I am so happy to be home.