Moving as Home

You are not quite sure how you came here,
to this place, and this time. Nearly dying
a time or few.
Picking up pieces. Picking up stakes
and moving more than your stuff,
your whole spirit, lock, stock, and antiques,
to northern mountains, visually so similar
to where you once were, emotionally
s foreign land where there were no expectations,
a place you could grow, like a child
into your own colors, with the mountains around you,
Just like home, except entirely different.

The irony is that in moving here, you discovered the sea,
half a day’s drive away, Vast and unknowable,
you discovered you needed, not protection,
but exposure. A place with no place to hide.
Emptiness, a place to bleed,
where the tides can carry the blood away,
and the salt air, the salt water, heals.

Healing has its costs.
Things are lost. Things are found.
Experiments fail. What you once believed
was medicine, harms you. You learn,
You pay the price of healing
before you know what form it will take<
trusting not in history, but in faith.

And now, mostly healed, you live in two worlds.
Surrounded by mountains,
always yearning for the sea. for foreign lands,
Perhaps, you think, it is not the place,
it is the traveling, where your soul lives.
More of a nomad than your history of homes
would indicate. Living less where you are
than where you are going.

About this poem.

Just a little self-examination after church on a Sunday morning. Spawned, I think, from a road trip I am planning in March.

Be well. Travel wisely,

Tom

PS – The picture was taken near my house, on Route 30 in Pawlet, VT.