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.