Fires still lit for early mornings and fading light at day’s end.
Skies filled with a sometimes warm sun riding on still too crisp breezes.
Spring seems to whimper in a corner as winter refuses to yield.
But our rhythmic days have returned after the whirlwind tumble of school breaks.
Maybe it’s age, maybe it’s the mediative quality of the island, but I find myself so deeply in love with routine these days.
It means everyone is well. It means the wheels are all turning. It means contentment.
I used to bristle at sameness, ache for difference. For my days to scream like a crow’s caw.
Now I long for and settle into, celebrate my days that look like every other.
I cook and study and play and tuck in and wake and do it again and again and again, happily.
It’s become like a dance.
The place I come home to.
This routine of my perfectly simple life.
A very special friend of mine in NY recently sent me a book of poetry. (Is there a better gift from a friend than a book of poetry?)
In it David Whyte writes,
This it the bright home
in which I live,
this is where I ask
my friends to come,
this is where I want
to love all things
it has taken me so long
to learn to love.
This is the temple
of my adult aloneness
and I belong
to that aloneness
as I belong to my life.
There is no house
like the house of belonging.