The feeling of coming home.

Beth and Ben have their computer hooked up to the tv making my work seem very important. Yes I call this, my seemingly mindless download onto the tv/computer screen/virtual world of the internet, work. Because it is necessary, it is relevant to the state of my soul and heart, it is creative discipline. I spoke it out loud to Beth: could it be true? Two years of pining for the time when I go away and just write, only write, no teaching no counseling no waitressing no energy healing no farm work no scheduling, just me. Writing. Administering in to words the Real Work. That, and that alone, for the first time? It feels surreal, could it really, really actually be real?

It's getting near.

I left the farm where I've lived and worked since October yesterday and headed north up the coast on 101. In Port Orford I called Beth to say I wouldn't be able to finish the drive, it was night by then and storming and whole pine branches were blowing so fast past my car they were only a blur of raindrops and green. Since I lived up here on the Oregon Coast in 04 and 05 it's always made me laugh. Weather that we'd call hurricanes back east they just eye-rollingly call winter storms. I pulled over in the parking lot to make the call and my car was blowing so hard you could actually hear the metal denting in and out. I was scared.

At the motel in Bandon the man tried to get me high. That's the second older man to come on to me in the past week, furthering my sense of being a woman on the verge of 35. Not sure why but I am really feeling my age: in the motel that was sweet like 1950's quaint smells like grandma's with a little kitchenette and a place to sit in the corner sweet, I caught myself in the mirror and was stunned a minute. There are no mirrors really on the farm, and there I was. Living out of my car in the mountains on a commune, travel-weary but peaceful and happy to be on the road. And turning the far corner of the year that will finish and make me 35.

When one arrives there's a reflective sense that happens, and it grounds us in a very practical way into our current reality. I am not talking about physical arrival so much as some intuitive experience of satisfaction, and it's in me, I'm of it right now. It led me all morning, finishing my drive in the rain counting all of Oregon's endless shades of dark green and grey. There, the Umpqua Lighthouse, there the drab clapboards of Winchester Bay, there the Lamplight Inn, there the cement of Oldtown Florence, there in the distance the Five Rivers Bridge.  Little starbursts of recognition, little nods of yes and mmm-hmmm, the natural expansion in me I always get in Oregon that means only one thing: I have arrived again.  The feeling of coming home.

At Governor Patterson's beach I jumped out in my rain coat just so I could breathe the breath that only comes with the sea.

Later, Beth met me half-way through her doorway. We hugged. That pause there, that outbreath, felt like sitting down on the beach for the first time in June. That good.

It's Thanks-giving time, and I am grateful. To be so clearly where I am meant to be. To be so aware of it. I pray the same peace and settledness for all the hearts out there I know.