As I type, my small laptop is perched on top of a bucket of kindling and I am feeding the woodstove simply for the quiet joy of watching the fire. It’s Thursday morning and we arrived home Tuesday late afternoon. I woke today at 4am and have been reading and writing poetry, penning letters to friends, and enjoying tea. I appreciate more and more making the big life change move we did, in order to live more simply, less consumed by so much work-for-pay, able to afford living more by feel and heart than societal conscription. And even though I sometimes feel like I am too much just one giant heart walking around, I am proud to be a woman with a growing capacity for living and loving.
It was hard to leave Deer Park. Harder than I remember in past years. It’s the same heartbreak I experience when we leave Montana and head there. I’m starting to realize that my heart has been getting a certain workout, a certain potent kind of next-level training, in splitting our time for longer stints between these two homegrounds for the last 4-years. I am discovering that my heart is expanding in ways that I didn’t know was possible. And in the unfolding process of this heart expansion adventure, I am experiencing that the more the heart grows the more frequently it breaks. And as hard and gut wrenching as it sometimes is, I am also pretty sure it’s worth it.
It’s rather a strange feeling to have one’s heart reside in two places. To have two different landscapes set 1,200 miles apart which complete one another in an energy cycle of affinity and affection. But as my practice continues, I am learning how to hold more than one thing at a time. The vessel of my heart is expanding in its capacity for bringing aboard new passengers. I am learning that I don’t always have to choose between one thing and another thing. The more my heart grows, the more I can hold and the less I need to choose what to keep and carry and what I need to throw man-overboard.
Admittedly, it’s a hard superpower to wield. But then, everything takes practice.
going outwords & inwords 