To Be Here, Home

The darkness dissipates as it does every morning, gradually, glacially, as the sun inched northward, relinquishing someone else's day in pursuit of our own. As I say, it is hardly novel; indeed, this quotidian movement is so ordinary as to routinely go unnoticed.

But not this morning. I sit out on the deck and allow it to unfold me as well as the morning. Yes, the sky - only moments ago full of stars - is clear and permits the emerging glow it's full and unobstructed stage. Yes, the air is crisp, befitting a new autumn day. But singular beauty is not what simultaneously settles and evokes me this emerging dawn. It is simply that I haven't seen it envelop this particular landscape in quite awhile - first, the silhouette of the trees, and then the rounded shape of the chicken coops; the outlines of the leaves in the nearby trees, and eventually the hints, the teasing foretastes, of autumn's golds and reds and yellow and bronze. The morning of a new day. The dawning of a new season. Now the rooster officially announces the fact.

We've been traveling.

First, there was grief work to attend. Emotions, consolations, ruminations, details; simultaneously carrying and being held. Physically we were elsewhere - emotionally, relationally, psychologically, too.

Home, then, for a rapid-fire turnaround during which we scarcely looked around before flying off again.

The hours and the stories and the laughter and the tears, the tasks and the memories and the new experiences forged, first, days and then weeks until finally, long after darkness had settled upon our traveling stamina and Taproot Garden, we arrived home last night. Our travels have been rich. Glorious, even. The distance and the privacy came at a good time. The celebrations we indulged, the landscapes on which we became drunk, the time together to both remember and dream. To simply "be".

I listen now to the stirring chickens, already clamoring for release. I survey the garden from the deck's distance, wondering what gifts might still be on offer after such neglect. Mostly I simply receive the familiar and now beloved landscape, night's curtain raised, accept the sudden lump in my throat, and whisper a prayerful gratitude for being here.

Here.

As the poem of this day begins, I recall the observation with which Wendell Berry closes one of his own:

"What we need is here."

Here.

It's good to be home.