Feeling at home within your own mind and body is hard work. It would be so easy to slip out a side door, where distraction and hardship and conflict all compete for your attention. Where your daily routine placates you and drains all your energy. Where you’re asked to give more and more of yourself until you’ve all but forgotten about the home in your chest, the four walls inside.
You’ll find the front door is unlocked. Come back in.
There’s dust collecting, lights that haven’t been turned on for quite some time, but you’re so missed and so wanted here. Take a cool, clean cloth and run it over everything – the walls, the corners, the cracks between the floorboards. See how everything shines, how it always did beneath it all.
Make the bed with fresh white sheets. Draw curtains back from windows like eyes flying wide open and return to yourself. Fill this place with your laughter, your absentminded, happy humming and with scents of jasmine and eucalyptus. Dance in the kitchen and cook barefoot sipping rich red wine.
Walk the halls and trail your fingers over the plans and dreams framed above the fireplace. Over the stacks of beloved records and books that fed your soul and taught you how to feel. Over the macaroni necklaces and poems and fruits of your colorful imagination that took you so much work so many years ago.
You can rest here, create here, flourish here, for as long as you need. In your own company, in the quiet and stillness save for the breeze flowing in through open windows. Stay and savor the deep satisfaction of being alone but not lonely. Take in the sturdy walls around you, the fresh flowers picked from your garden on the windowsill. Sit peacefully within yourself, with all that you have built and learned and endured, and come home.
photo courtesy of Annie Spratt
Bridget Cook 