She asked me how it felt to come home—is it hard for you? So much has changed—
A year passed since I drove through the mountains to Southern Oregon and experienced one of the most profound shifts in my life. It didn’t happen all at once—there was no big bang evolution, but a slow unwinding, then one day, I was free.
It was a weekend in June and I realized I had laughed, wept, screamed and sang all in one morning. There had been an unblocking— like some masonry built ages ago had finally dislodged, the earth shook and it all came falling. I had room inside of myself to feel everything with an awareness and openness that I had never had until then.
I was on my way to my childhood home, a place that had been a constant state of conflict and contradiction within me, a land of memory that anguished and loved me. I was afraid to go, knowing the looseness in myself, the ease of feeling and what could possibly come rushing through as I visited family, but I allowed myself to trust my process, something alchemical was taking place.
Do you know what letting go feels like? It feels like this—where rivers can now move through you, light shining where there was dense forest shade.
We can tell our minds to let go, but the body is not so easily persuaded.
I was attached, my heart bound by history, a story I thought I was meant to live out but could not align myself with. I could say that my entire life has been a tug of war between the person I am becoming and the one I have been and imagined I would be. We have stories, and then, we have our story. I have not lost my origins. To let the old stories go, is to remove the weight and energy of them from my physical form and set them down. One day, I no longer needed to pick them up, fitting back into their braided cords to feel at home. Home is being built in me, living in this embodied place looks and feels like safety, and it is a presence with all that comes visiting.
The magic was going back to my childhood as a grown woman and reliving experiences that I cherished as a young girl. It was the embodiment of positive memory that merged the two parts of me. Past and future came together in present time as we swam in pond water, rode a bicycle down the driveway at golden hour, ate meals with my siblings, watched an outdoor movie, picked berries, and camped in the neighboring field. Throughout the three days, I allowed the coming and going of every experience, emotion and thought. This kind of presence has an air of cinematic quality, as the main character witnesses a moment of profound meaning and time is portrayed in slow motion scenes. It feels like this, to be a witness to life.
To be a witness, takes setting down expectations, ideals, old beliefs over and over again until you walk forward and recognize how firmly your feet meet the soft earth, how tears feel as they wash your warm skin in salt water, how your heart bubbles and rushes and flows like a spring and you drink it until you are full and you keep walking, knowing you do not need to hold on to anything but for a moment.
Motherland
It feels more simple now,
my heart wide open
where life can rush in
and pour out.
A wellspring,
constant give
and take.
I leap into his arms
and kiss him,
she holds me
while I weep.
Body hot
and a dive
into pond water,
bike ride down
the country drive,
hair blazing gold
and windstrewn,
light paints mountains
purple and sky pink.
Venus dances with dusk,
children run through fields
of grass head high alive
in grasshopper buzz.
With this room
I hold in my chest
I have become witness,
choosing full expression
for each moment passing.
Wearing the air of pennyroyal
I sleep tangled in stars.
-Hannah Elizabeth King
MOTHERLAND