Returning

 

This morning, first thing, before I was even out of bed, I grabbed my phone to turn off an alarm, and then hit play on a voice message from a friend. She was reading Sharon Blackie’s If Women Rose Rooted with the book club she runs, and told me she had to read me an excerpt because it reminded her of me.

I was already feeling a bit of a birthday vibe, some weeks before my actual birthday, and these words, this seeing of me, was the very best of gifts.

I closed my eyes and I saw myself getting up from that hill and walking down through the brightly painted wooden front door of a simple stone cottage, sitting in an armchair by a glowing stove, reading a book or maybe even writing one. I saw myself waking up to the nascent promise of each new dawn, taking my morning tea outside, listening to the birdsong and the bark of a vixen in the wood. I saw my hands in the soil, my feet cold and bare in a fast-flowing river. The person I saw wasn't anxious, alienated, brittle. It wasn’t her job that defined her but her way of being in the world. She looked as if she belonged. Not just to a star, and a hill and a cottage, but to herself, and the calling owls, and the wider world she inhabited.

I’ve come back full circle, again, to the woman Blackie’s words describe. Most years, I get a few months in and then decide I have to do something else because I need a capital J Job. I need to know what exactly it is that I do. I need to earn a living.

That last one is true. But what does that ‘living’ become if I’m driven by doing, not being? This year, I want to stay in the being. And next year, and the next. And in the being, find what I’m doing.

(This is all sounding a bit Joey Tribbiani and “Giving and receiving…and receiving. And giving..” But I’m going to trust you to understand.)

As I step past my second Saturn Return today, and into my third act, I want more than ever to belong to myself.