Landing

What I am grateful for

There is much to be grateful for on this day of Thanksgiving—food, family, friends, even football. Most of all, I give thanks for this place I find myself in. The physical space, of course, and the emotional and spiritual spaces as well. Almost four years ago I clicked yes on ‘would you like to tour this property’ on Zillow, and within a week I found myself under contract for an 1890 farmhouse in West Virginia. The move was the most impulsive thing I’ve ever done, and I am not an impulsive person.

Sometimes, I wonder where I’d be if I hadn’t made this leap of faith to move to a state where I knew no one. Maybe the same as the day I sat in my recliner in my Baltimore rowhouse looking for change—sad, lonely, numb, empty, fearful, and nursing a daily gin-and-tonic habit. Who knows?

But what I do know is this: moving here to The Land healed me of the fear and anxiety that had riddled the prior years. Here, I have found peace and calm, friendship and community. Here, every day something new surprises me and gives me pause to reflect on beauty and joy—a wren nest built into a peat cup, lobelia inflata popping up all over my garden knowing I needed her, frost gilding my clary sage. Walking out to get the mail and the barn across the street bathed in light, clouds puffing across the blue expanse of sky. Even something as small and huge as a friend texting to say ‘hey, thinking of you, appreciating you.’

As the physical and emotional return to soundness, the space for the spiritual has opened within me. It is difficult to describe this expansiveness, the sense of light, other than to say it is not new though I don’t recall the experience before. This feels innate and organic, an old friend who has never left, who has inhabited my bones and blood and cells my whole life, invisible, and now making herself known.

So, I am grateful for landing here in West Virginia. For the place and the people, the opportunity to just be and become. It is wondrous.

Happy Thanksgiving. Peace…