Month: March 2025

Here or there?

/ Gin Getz / 2 Comments

And wouldn’t you know. The biggest tree that fell in the latest storm crushed a shed we built two years back.

A friend once told me I had the best luck of anyone she knew.

And the worst.

So Bob’s on the road and I’m trying to get stuff done while not tied to the mill (and kitchen) which feels like how my days have been spent the past few weeks.

Good news is he’s hauling this beautiful big load of lumber, a pretty impressive nine thousand plus pounds of beams and boards we milled, to our high-mountain-Colorado-one-day-will-be-home.

Me, I have big plans of my own. Tilling the garden and getting the last of the cover crop seeded before the next rains. Putting in a couple more rows of spring crops. And mowing the waaaaaaaay overgrown grass. With a simple push mower and somewhat steep hill, this kicks butt even when the grass is manageable. The lawn seeks revenge for neglect.

Of course it doesn’t turn out as planned. What does?

See, I was planning on cheating from my “no till” stance by getting the old Troy Build rototiller fired up. It’s about as old and a helluva lot heavier than me, but man is this a beast of burden and it gets the job done. Guess I’m gonna have to get that spading fork out after all (or wait for Bob to return if my ego allows) because after pulling, pulling, pulling only to realize it’s out of fuel, I pour in gas only to watch it pour out some tiny little hole I’d never seen before. After putting a coffee can underneath to catch that spill, I call Bob on the road.

“Turn the tank off,” he wisely advises. Duh. Mechanics are not my thing.

So I do. But then I can’t turn the rusty dial back on when I’m done doing some other procedures Bob talks me through to try an fix the beast. And then that shut off, well, it’s gonna be shut off for a while because the damn thing breaks.

Well, I did manage to get the spring crops in and mow before the rain, but the cover crop will have to wait.

In the meanwhile, I invite you to take a tour of the garden, humbly as it was yesterday without a fresh tilling, is today in the rains, and then bragging on how it was in the bounty of last summer if you care to see one of the reasons why it’s so hard for me to leave this place.

So that thing about place.

I finally figured this out. You probably did long ago. I’m slow. Slow living. Slow learning. Whatever.

Our place is where we belong.

It may be a physical place, person, community, a state to live in, a state of mind.

But here’s the thing:

It all comes down to connection.

Connection, as in joining, being a part, somehow linked, united or bound together.

Connection determines our place.

Connection defines where we belong.

Whatever we feel connected to – close friends, your place in community, the old family farm, a mountain, the sea, the school where you have been teaching for thirty years – these things give us a sense of belonging. Different for us all, and always changing at least a little bit because that’s how life goes, that sense of belonging that connection creates helps us feel stable, secure, grounded. And we all need that.

There’s also that thing about connection being intertwined with commitment, contribution and care. but let’s talk about that another time, because this already threatens to be way too long. That happens. Especially when Bob’s not around, the rains force me indoors, and I find myself talking to the dogs and my self way too much.

Okay, so here’s the interesting twist I’m finally figuring out. Connection with others (the “where ” and “with whom” we belong) begins by connecting with self.

You know. It’s that “home is inside” wisdom my old friend used to say.

No, it’s not selfish. It’s still means giving more than you take, because end of the day, what we do for others is still what matters most and gives us in return some sense of meaning (and yes, belonging). But it’s about making sure you have something to give to begin with. Starting with the basics. The foundation. Figuring where (and with whom) we feel safe, and can be ourselves. Where our soul feels nourished and nurtured. For me, that means my husband, our son, and a strong sense of solitude, spirit, simplicity, and the natural and animal world. It’s time writing, growing food, working with horses, and luckily, yes, even building! Because these things make my inside shine. They may not define me, but they do define that sense of place I’m trying to find.

You know the feeling. It’s that place, space or state where you lose sense of time and feel safe and have trouble leaving. The place you long for, where you long to be. It’s more of a feeling than a physical person or place. It’s that knowing we are where we are meant to be, doing what we’re meant to be doing. That is belonging. We all long to belong. All of us. We are hardwired to want to belong. And when we lack that belonging or feel we don’t, connection is broken, and we somehow feel broken too.

It’s that happy place.

For me, the physical place has changed and may continue to change, as long as it contains an element of rugged and wild. But the essence remains the same. Like my core nature. It’s what feeds me, and in kind, allows me to feed others even more.

With that, I am starting to see it need not be so much “where” we are, but “who” we are that allows us to figure out where we belong. And somewhere in the equation, to notice the difference between “belonging” and “clinging”. Clinging holds us down. Belonging allows us to soar in place. Not to hold on because of fear. But because of freedom.

Maya Angelou famously stated, “You only are free when you realize you belong no place — you belong every place — no place at all. The price is high. The reward is great”. 

It sounds paradoxical, but I believe it’s all true.

Sometimes I wish I had a crystal ball or could read tea leaves or somehow figure out answers to those big pressing questions, the easy way. But life isn’t easy. And easy isn’t always good.

When people ask me, “Where are you from?” it feels like a trick question. I hesitate, look up and off to the left, and try to come up with a clever response. It’s complicated. Might be easier if someone asked, “What do you do?” (That sounds so 80s and 90s. Do people even say that anymore?). Can’t say I know how to answer that one too.

You know that expression about the apple not falling far from the tree, right? But that’s assuming the tree has solid roots. And what if it does not? If I stayed to close to my rootless tree, I’d still be in Jersey. Nothing wrong with that, just not where I was meant to be.

Surely I’m not the only one out there trying to figure this out.

The answers will be different for us all, but maybe the process is the same.

We gotta listen to our heart and soul.

We gotta listen with our heart and soul.

My research is based on life, living and learning to listen to the wisdom of that quiet heart and soul.

I don’t have the privilege of a college degree. I left high school at 16 and learned to make do, make up and do without.

I learned what’s real based on what I saw, heard and felt, NOT what I read or was told.

I am still learning.

As for place, this much I know. Finding my place has been the trip of my life.

I’m still not there.

On one hand, I long to belong to one place, to remain long enough to watch trees I plant grow big and fat and fruitful, to have it all built and done and be able to kick back and watch, tend, and care for lovingly, to sit on the front porch with a cup of coffee and my honey and look around with contentment and know we are finally done building and need to build no more.

On the other hand, I’m not ready to settle down and do the same thing year after year just yet. I’m curious. Adventurous, in a quiet, simple way. I want to experience and try and do more. Not big fancy elaborate things like trips around the world and luxuries that aren’t my thing. I want to know what it feels like to break ground and get to work and feel the pride of creating a family ranch that holds us – my self, my husband, our son, our pets and livestock, with gardens and trees (yes, I’m going to grow at 10,000 feet!). I want to be bundled up and see the expansive sunrise on Winter Solstice from the front deck we will build, or the summer sun rise as the full moon sets from the top of an unnamed mountain behind our ranch.

I know. I want a lot. Simple stuff, but a lot of it.

But most important, I want to be at that place of belonging that is not a place out there, but a space in here. Within me.

It doesn’t matter where I am. It matters who I am.

I am not the land.

There’s more to me than the mud on my boots and under my nails.

Though that is how I chose to live.

Here or there?

California? Colorado?

I won’t be losing either way.

Why can’t I have both?

Maybe I can. For now, that’s what I intend to do.

Here and there.

But of course, there is this. The cold hard reality of affording your dreams. Money. Geez, I hate talking about that. I have always believed I had enough (though my son can tell you stories of the poverty we lived with) and things just work out. Kinda. Sorta. More or less.

It always seems to work out. Not always as we plan. Sometimes even better.

In the meanwhile, as I try to figure out how to make this all work, I’ll work on finding that place inside. The place where I belong.

Sometimes that is hardest place to be.

At home in my own skin, being okay being me.

Until next time,

With love, always love,

Gin

On plans and places.

/ Gin Getz / Leave a comment

(looking back at the healthy forest surrounding our little bit of paradise – that little clearing in the center – here in the far north of California)

~

Contemplating slow living and the complexities of the simple life.

So much of that is based on making the most of what you have, and doing it yourself.

As in, if you want lumber for building…

You fall trees, skid them, clean the slash, load logs on the mill, saw them to size, stack them.

And then in this case… haul them from here to there.

California to Colorado.

Simple living, sounding somewhat complicated.

I’ll explain.

This is my first attempt at sharing a video on this blog. I want to show you what milling is like. However, it’s hard to hold a device in one hand AND crank the mill with the other. So I may have some figuring out to do. In the meanwhile, go ahead and say it: Cinematography is not my strong point.

Bob did a lot better. This is the video he took after I whined about how bad mine was.

~

So about the mill.

It’s slow, old, free and ours.

It was left behind at another “high and wild” property we once owned, just for a little while. Another fixer upper. That place was a little TOO high. At an elevation of 11,400 feet, turned out to be too much even for Bob and me. We got headaches, bloody noses, had trouble sleeping, got battered by the elements… but we did fix the place up nicely and flipped it.

And, bonus: we got this mill out of the deal.

Yeah, I know, it’s old. Go ahead and say it (Bob does all the time): too old! It’s crazy slow. You gotta crank the wheel for several minutes just to raise or lower the carriage that holds the blade, then crank some more to move the carriage as the blade inches it way through the wood. Crank again to raise it, crank it back to the beginning, then lather, rinse, repeat. It’s a lot of cranking and a helluva a test of patience. Apparently I have a lot, because even as the one doing all that cranking, every time Bob shows me pictures or starts talking about a new mill, I’m quick to shut him down.

“This is what we have,” I remind him (and myself). And though it’s slow, check it out: it works. We’ve used more modern mills. You know, those fancy ones with bells and whistles, flashing lights, keyboards, electronics or at least hydraulics that cost about as much as a mortgage. This one is gear and chain and crank drive, do your own measuring and your own math, and it was free. Simple. Slow living, slow milling, see what I mean?

Slow as it is, I love it. Yes, I love milling. I love the smell of the wood, and working out in the elements (most times). I love watching dead trees turn into valuable lumber. And I love working with my husband, which after twenty something years building together has brought us to that place of operating in relative wordlessness and this flow that feels almost like a dance. We know what needs to be done, move in unison, use hand signals, nods and knowing glances (and probably a few grunts) to converse. Slow and steady, it works for us.

Despite clothes, hair, and all parts of exposed (and somehow even covered) skin getting enrobed in sawdust every afternoon, the pride in making our own lumber from our own trees is a thrill for me. Maybe I’m an odd sort, but I’m in the right place.

And slow as the mill and the process is, it does work. Beautifully. We milled all the dimensional lumber for that “high and wild” remodel with this mill. There, a buddy milled all the logs for an entire cabin from the beetle kill trees on that land. When we moved from Colorado to California, we brought the mill with us and processed all the lumber for this remodel we’re living in now (you can see some of it HERE.). And maybe when we’re done milling here this spring, chances are we’ll move it back.

Here and now, because of that mill and the beetle killed timber on this land, the majority of materials for our upcoming build are free. (Oh and a big shout out of thanks to my sis and her man for the incredible windows we scored as they replaced theirs!) Beat that. Makes slow somehow okay that way.

The process starts with Bob doing most of the work you forget needs to be done before you even get to mill: falling trees, delimbing and clearing slash, skidding logs, loading them onto the mill. Then I get to do my magic.

I’m the (not necessarily) smooth operator of this old roaring beast, which entails a lot of cranking as I said: cranking her up and down and back and forth, moving the blade through the log with each pass. Sloooooowly. Like everything about this process. Yet… beautifully! At least it’s beautiful to me.

We’ve used it so long, done it so much, by now it’s muscle memory for me. I’m so used to the sound and feel I can do it with my eyes closed. And often I have to. Because when the wind blows my way, which often times it does, so does the sawdust.

And after almost every pass, there’s the joint effort of rolling the log on the mill, which involves a bunch of prying with peaveys and few grunts and groans, then carrying each board off to be sorted and stacked.

Board by board, beam by beam, slowly we’re amassing what we need to build a new home.

It’s exciting. Rewarding in so many ways. Not the least of which is that in the process of taking down trees to mill, we’re cleaning up our land. See, a lot of the doug fir is dying. Beetle kill. Not even close to devastating and depressing as it was back fifteen years or so ago in southern Colorado when we witnessed the demise of 90% of the blue spruce trees there. Year after year, mile after mile, mountain after mountain, a giant wave, gradual and all consuming, turned the hills from green to gray. All those trees, killed by a tiny beetle no bigger than a grain of rice.

Pine beetles, bark beetles, call them what you will. They’re in California too. Only here in Trinity County, at least on our land and the hills surrounding us here, it doesn’t feel devastating. It isn’t. See, here, when one tree dies, another spreads it wings and seems to take flight in the newfound open space. So as some of our doug fir die, the black oak, white oak, live oak, oregon ash, alder, dogwood and madrone already in place, open with the added air space and water that the crowding conifers otherwise devour. It feels somehow natural, normal, beautiful to witness this change over the past nearly six years we’ve been here, as parts of the land unfurls like a giant exhale, revealing the sky and a sense of spaciousness, and we watch as part of our land shifts from a conifer forest to a healthy oak grove. The diversity of species here is remarkable. You barely notice the loss of evergreens were it not for the low stumps left behind.

Thanks to these beetles, we have plenty of trees to build with.

Damn. After the devastation our Colorado mountains endured due to those little buggers, I never, ever thought I say something nice about them.

And so it goes: if you want lumber, fall trees, clear slash, etc. and then… haul to Colorado.

So about that part about hauling to Colorado…

Really?

Yes, really.

See, even after milling off the rotted two to three inches that many of these big trees often have around their girth, what we’re left with is a lot of lumber. Good lumber. Really good, and better than what we’d mill in Colorado. These dead doug fir have heavier, heartier wood than beetle kill blue spruce. Wood strong enough for framing, thick enough to stack for walls, and dense enough to hold heat inside the cabin they’ll one day be.

That’s what this work is all about now. Like mining for gold. Getting down to the good stuff. And this wood is good.

And here’s the thing. Time is of the essence. Sure it would be great to take our time and log and skid and peel and notch and slowly stack logs from our Colorado land where this house will be. And for our next project, that’s what we plan to do. (Yes, knowing us…)

But for now, for starters, for just getting a cabin built, quick and simple and safe and sound, lets be real. We won’t have that time this year. The only chance we have of getting this project done and having a roof over our head and solid structure to winter in (which in the high wild mountains of Colorado is a serious thing) is to do it this way – mill the lumber now, while we can, before the crunch of summer building begins. Or spend a lot of money we don’t have and hire some crew to do it all, wham bam.

Tempting as that sounds some times, that is not what we’ll do.

Slow and steady, we’ll get it done, by making the most of what we have. A lot of beetle killed trees and one old mill. And we’ll work around what we don’t have: time! Building a house from the ground up in the short season between the ground thawing (May) and the ground freezing again (October) – and building something solid and secure enough to winter in – is already a daunting project for a couple that some say have a few too many years behind them to be taking such a project on. Oh yeah, and in addition to the cabin… there’s getting the solar, septic, greenhouse, horse shelter, chicken coop and wood shed (full) done during that time frame as well.

Geez, when I think of all that, I wonder how the hell we’re going to get it done. I probably shouldn’t be sharing our plans as it’s not going to help with our mounting stress.

Just get to work and get it done and stop whining.

And all the while, try to have fun, find the magic and joy and awe all around, be good to each other, each and every day, no matter how slow it goes.

And really, that’s what we do.

So that was the part about “plans.” Haven’t even started sharing the part about “place.”

Guess I’ll save those deep thoughts for another day.

~

Until then.

With love, always love,

Gin

Hear. Now.

/ Gin Getz / 2 Comments

Last night just past midnight I woke expecting the full moon to guide my way through the otherwise dark cabin. It did not. The lunar eclipse! Amazing how magical these things are, and note to self to never stop finding magic well taken.

Stumbling over sleeping dogs, I stepped out onto the front porch. There was a cold, light rain, somewhat soft and it felt good against my bare feet and naked skin. I wanted to see if I could see the eclipse. Hard to see what’s dark, and even harder when it’s hidden behind clouds.

I returned to the warm bed in awe none the less, for the reminder of the magic this little event stirred in me.

Later I woke again and listened. The gentle patter of rain on metal roof turned silent. I know what this means. More magic. The rain had turned to snow.

Right now I’m sitting here writing to you by candle light inside while the snow continues out there. Yes, I could flick a switch. We have solar power (though it’s true, not an abundance, and certainly not in this weather). But the simple life comforts me. The peace of stillness and silence soothes me. It’s easy to find here. And sometimes easy is good: a lot less wires and bells and whistles and high tech stuff that’s inevitably going to break down. Yet at times, it’s harder, too. If we want food (and of course we do), we grow it, at least the majority of it. If we want heat, buck and split wood, stoke a fire. If we want shelter, build it. If we want light, we strike a match and light a candle or oil lamp.

Yes, this “simple life” is work, and a lot of it, but it’s a direct life. If we want something, we work for it. Want a home, build it. Food, plant it and tend to it for hours each to day to allow it grow with abundance. Want water, bury lines from the spring to the house. Rather than working for money to pay for these things, we work for them directly. See? Simple. And yet those of us that live this way so often hear, “What do you all day? Don’t you get bored?” Smile sweetly, say nothing. It’s one of those things. If you know, you know.

It’s getting light out now, though the snow is coming down harder than ever. Time for me to bundle up and head out to do chores. Feed the chickens that lay the eggs. Let out the horses that make manure that enable the garden to grow… that sort of thing. Simple, yes?

But before I go out, I just wanted to say this. Since I started writing here again, the words have been flooding. I’m drowning in incomplete ideas. This, today, will be no different.

See, what I wanted to share was about belonging. How maybe it’s more about care, connection and contribution – what we do for others – that defines the place where we belong. At least that’s my latest idea to mull over. And I wanted to share about courage – the courage it takes as a writer (as any artist) to open your soul and pour, then put it out there for the world to see (alas, mine is but a little world). And I wanted to write about passion for place, the intimate connection between person and place, comparing land to lover.

But I’m not going to write any of that today. I’m going to go out in the snow with my dogs and take care of what needs to be done to make this simple life worth living.

~

I wrote this yesterday. Maybe it’s still relevant. Maybe it’s old news. But to prove my point to myself, this thing about care, commitment and contribution… things that really matters, that I’m trying to work out, trying to write about, but I haven’t figured out “how” just yet, I’m going to muster up the courage to share this (and hope I don’t wince at my foolishness afterwards).

Rain. Snow. A little sun.

Today in the far north of California it’s a southern Colorado spring day. A little bit of everything. Wait five minutes, and it will change.

Hats on and off, zippers up and down.

Speeding up the season.

Slowing down progress.

When what we need to be doing is falling trees and milling timber, we’re inside keeping the wood cook stove going to keep the cabin warm. Go ahead and bake another loaf of bread and more cookies we don’t really need ’cause when what we need we can’t have, might as well make the most of where you are and what you got. Right now, that means time inside to chill, and a wood cook stove that’s hot.

Truth is, it’s been a good excuse to stay indoor and to work on plans. Floor plans. Spread across the kitchen table like breadcrumbs and a splash of black coffee. It’s all part of the process. Last time we built from scratch involved submitting fourteen pages of detailed plans, hand drawn on graph paper yet still technical and precise, for a log cabin inspected and built to code. That’s a big deal for us hillbilly cowboy sorts than didn’t go to school for this stuff, just figured it out as we went along. This time ’round, hopefully a clear idea of what we’re building should suffice.

With drawing close to complete, it’s time to get back out there and at it. Falling, hauling, milling, stacking…

We are ready. The weather? Not so much..

No matter the weather, spring comes. In spite of fresh snow on the hills behind us, the almond blossoms open and peach trees are close behind. A few brave asparagus have burst through moist ground, and last season’s kale is going to seed.

The first bed of spring crops is in, new kale, spinach, broccoli and chard, carefully tucked under row covers to protect the small plants from the still cold elements – and the dogs.

With a break in the rain, we go to the garden. Milling can wait. Growing our food cannot.

The dogs lay in freshly turned soil. My husband lays on the grass. Me, I lean into the shovel, and smile.

Meanwhile and always, water flows.

Here, now, as before and will be, a river calls us to sit beside and listen.

Listen.

A shrill whistle cuts through the air.

The call is simple. Familiar. Stirring me someplace deep within.

Emanating from branches of dark timber, the song of the Redwing, piercing through the dun of hard rain on metal roof and an ever swelling river.

Listen.

Hear.

Here.

Now.

You cannot outrun the past. The past is the path that led you to where you are today.

Yet in moving, you leave where you were behind. In a way, you leave a piece of who you were behind as well. A part of you left in the soil you fed with countless wheelbarrow loads of manure gathered each day from the horses. A part in the fruit trees that may feed only bear and deer when we are gone. A part in the people.

That can be the hardest thing to leave.

And in that void between what you have left behind and what you are crafting anew, you become the blank slate. The clay upon the potters’ wheel. You are both the clay and the hands that shape it.

We are not moving back nor backwards. We are moving forward towards a place that feels familiar with the clear crisp air and intense light and breathtaking endless horizons. A place where we’ll recognize the flash of mountain bluebirds and the bloom of showy cinquefoil. the fragrance of fallen aspen leaves and the soothing balm of winter snow. We’ll leave parts of that past behind. Time has healed trauma. Stories carry weight only if force fed as a mother still fattening a grown child. There are better things to nurture now.

Now is the time for re-writing. Not based upon where you are, but who you are.

The answers are not found out there. They are found in here. Within.

Where I should have looked all along.

Here and There.

/ Gin Getz / 2 Comments

Sounds of silence.

Oddly loud.

The puppy’s paws on crunching leaves. Frogs. Horses shifting in their close-by covered pen. The ever present song of the river still strong from this winter’s rains.

It’s dark. Behind me, there’s soft light from candles on the kitchen table. Before me, just enough to see shapes in shades of charcoal gray from the waxing moon still up over in the western sky

I’m sitting out on the deck as I do most every night before turning in, letting the dogs out one last time.

My nighttime ritual of taking one small bowl in a pipe filled with my special blend. Home grown tobacco, mullein, and mugwort. I’ve never been much for smoking anything altering, and my days of smoking the bright red box are gladly far behind me, along with my dreams of being the Marlboro woman. I breathe better now. I no longer fear my son will watch me drown in my own lungs from my own doing. It’s over twenty years since I left that habit behind. Over six since I left drinking behind. But still a gal’s gotta do what a gal’s gotta do. I’m not perfect, know I can’t be, and well, not really interested in being completely vice-free. So it is for me with this little pipe, my little smoke, my little bad habit that brings me out at the end of most days and allows me to sit on the deck in relative silence, often under the eve while the rain batters down, and just sit, just be.

It’s clear tonight. Cold. Cold for here, but not for there.

Here, stars twinkling through bare oak branches above me that connect the earth to sky.

Trying to just listen. Not to think. Quiet the mind. Loose my thoughts in the rumble of the river and the bits of infinite space above.

Can I just watch the tiny glow from the tip of this little pipe, the smoke wafting softly from my lips, the big dog laying still beside me?

Isn’t that enough?

How hard it is to simply be?

Not all of us were born where we belong.

Maybe I am not there yet. Maybe we never arrive. Maybe it’s all just an endless journey passing through places and time.

Somehow it feels close. That sense of being where I belong. Only it’s not what I thought it would be.

Is it “where?” No. Because I am where I thought I’d be full. And something still feels empty. Though it’s filling. At an oddly calm and gentle rate. Like a slow inhale, exhale, and the pause in between, time and time again.

It’s not about place. It’s something so much more.

It is a filling from within.

I thought place would define me.

Or does it, I wonder, confine me?

It has.

Not here. Not now.

I’m starting to feel free. And starting to feel comfortable in that groundlessness of not needing a place to tell me who I am, tell you what I am.

A dear old friend Em so often told me, “Home is inside.”

The last place I thought to look.

“Stop chasing rainbows,” she’d tell me. “What you’re looking for is is not out there. It’s within.”

Yet I watched her never fully find whatever she was seeking and I was left to wonder:

Do we ever get there?

Or is this a never-ending journey, of longing to belong. Of growing up.

Why did I ever think it would be easy?

And why did I ever think it would be done?

Tell me, is it just me, or do you wonder too?

Here.

Rubbing my eyes and adjusting to the soft pale light of a California early morning spring sky, laden with fog, that when it rises into nothingness but blue with big fat happy clouds, reveals swells of gentle mountains undulating in crisp sharp shadows that begin and end spring days. Living is easy here with mild elements, warm waters, and heavy humid air. It is comfortable and congenial, words I never sought to describe my world. And yet, I belong here. I feel a part of the sand as I lay in naked by the river, the oak under which we sleep on summer nights, the geese that return to nest by the river before our house, and the twenty-something fruit trees we planted: peach and pear, cherry and plum, apple, persimmon and fig. I feel a part of the wood nymph fairyland of thick moss and ferns and ancient trees dripping with old man’s beard and the sound of frogs and wind-chimes and a swollen river. I feel a part of the people, my neighbors and friends and folks in town, people I am comfortable with, at home with, can talk with about sharing seeds, starting seedlings, thinning carrots and canning peaches from our own fruit trees. People that make me feel I belong.

And yet too I belong there. Colorado. A part of the stark open sky that shocks you at sunrise, the intensity of the elements that determine our days, the shivering sound of bull elk bugling and teasing call of coyote, the lure of mountain tops surrounding us like dancing muses, and the impression of being so close you can touch the stars as you sit bundled by the campfire at night leaning back into a silence of nothing but wind. I feel a part of breathlessness and burning lungs as the elevation calls and the mountain seduces and I find my tired legs climbing higher and higher and higher still like a feral beast appeasing some inner hunger. As if I needed more to call me, there is family, our son, and well, that love outweighs the rest.

It’s a cowboy boot and Levi jean life there, at least for half the year. The other half is down and wool and a lot of layers. It may sound harsh, and I suppose it is, but something about it entices me. Rather than chill my passionate side, the cold and harsh, the high wild life of those Colorado mountains makes me come alive.

On the other hand… even in these unknown hidden hills in the far north of California it’s flip flops and shorts for half the year, and in winter you don’t need much more than a slicker. Here, in summer, we sleep out on the deck beneath wide arms of old oak trees, lullabied by the sound of the gently flowing river. Here, in cool gray light of early morning with my husband still asleep beside me, the same one I have wrapped my limbs around countless dark morning back there, too, I wake to the smell of sweet grass and willows and wild mint that wafts up from the damp banks as I lay still, trying to count the awakening birds by their particular call. With closed eyes, I know them by their sound. The Redwing, the raven, Steller’s Jay, Tanager, towhee and chickadee.

Is one world better than the other? Who am I to judge? All I know is, some days I want it all. Both. Everything. Everywhere. Here. There. Home. A sense of belonging. With both. To both. Maybe to all.

A feeling that I am where I’m meant to be. But how does one decide? Does the place define, or do the people? Is it “where” or “with whom” or something else, something deeper down, an inner voice, a higher knowing?

How does one decide?

Does the place call us, hold us? Heck, I’ve been called, held, then chewed up and spit out. It can’t be about place. I told you how I wished it were, wished I always knew, wished I was born where I was meant to remain.

But I wasn’t.

And that too is neither good, nor bad. It just is. I’m not the only one.

So I look within. For answers. For home. And watch it grow.

It’s being built. One log at a time. A rustic, little cabin in the wilds. My kind of home.

Within me.