LEAVING HOME

LEAVING HOME – written July 2018

            Two questions haunt me - almost every day someone asks, “Why are you moving to Colorado?” Followed up quickly with “How can you possibly leave your beautiful home and garden at Stonehaven?” I find it complicated to answer completely. It is easier to simply say: “Two of our children and their families live there.”

            We unequivocally adore our home in Pennsylvania. We lived for 26 years here in Main Line Philadelphia; a remarkable accomplishment for our peripatetic Canadian family who previously had moved every six years and extensively travelled in global mission communities. I am reminded of Kahlil Gibran’s admonition to parents that we must teach our children to have both roots and wings. Our family heritage as a couple taught us to fly high, far, and fast! For five decades we kept flying, but Stonehaven parented us into growing Earth roots.

            Our hearts are planted way down deep in this garden and in almost three centuries of dust under the wide-plank black walnut floors that probably were hewn from this land. We watch now as a young sapling we planted reaches up forty feet to hug old grandmother white maple who was here long before us. I could write for ever: about the ancient hand-dug well with its perfectly lined field-stones, the numerous standing stones dragged from the creek bed that we hoisted as sentinels, flower gardens built on special days that commemorate Kosovo, 9/11, Easter Saturday, and the Fukushima nuclear disaster. A burnt-out Death pole planted upside down when we let go of ever being able to own this place. The now exquisite water-garden that took six months of arduous work by our whole family. All of these and much more are daily blooming with joy and nostalgia in our well-watered souls. So, how could we also plant the ‘For Sale’ sign this month, just after finally being able to afford the most magnificent sweetly smelling cedar shake roof?!

            David Whyte in ‘Finisterre’ says that there is “no way to make sense of a world that wouldn’t let you pass, except to call an end to the way you had come.” Our soul journey as a couple deepened immeasurably here in this land but we have arrived at the end of the road. Like being on the final pilgrimage on the Camino, we face the sea, and leave behind the very thing that has brought us this far. For the pilgrim it is her shoes that she leaves on the sand, for us it is this home, this garden oasis which feels irreplaceable, but still we leave it behind and move West.  This is the clarion call of wild soul.

            I am clear that my days of being a worker bee are over - physically, emotionally and spiritually. My soulful being longs for something else - I know not what exactly - but I know I must eschew this present comfort for another season of life. There is yet an untamed wildness in me that seeks expression; the fierce global elder who seeks to be known in the way that a clap of thunder follows lightning, the way woodpecker beats her drum on a decaying tree, the way wild feline roars at night. It is a longing known in some measure from birth, that expects to co-create with Mystery in some evolving communal weaving.

            As we seek our new home in the quixotic place called Boulder, I am also painfully aware that there is something about ‘aging in place’ in a known community that feels enormously appealing as a human. A part of me wishes she were like Wendell Berry who has remained rooted in his ancestral fields and forests. Who really wants to move again across the country? Who wouldn’t want to grow older and die in the place where the ancestors of the land have taught you? But somehow our global DNA as a family still yearns for flight, so we stretch our wings once more and lean into the wind, trusting for lift-off to the Western mountains.

            And curiously once again, we survive each day with the tenterhooks of Stonehaven holding us in place, that 1700 fulling mill history where hides and weavings, like our lives, are stretched and hung, waiting to be seasoned by time. We wait for the right buyer to call. The phone is ominously silent and an urge to panic arises from my gut, our intensive work alleviates the anxiety of not-knowing. The fears that hide in the night taunt us from their well-scrubbed corners. Shadows follow us. Accidents, bad decisions, and broken relationships cannot be cleaned up. We are like our historic home - full of imperfections that hold true character, beautiful in the Light. No cleansing dose of paint or polish takes away the ragged potholes of time. Woven together and accepted “as is” in a safe and welcoming community – now that’s true beauty! We hope someone finds Stonehaven beautiful in that special way.

            There is no perfect way to say goodbye, no hermetic endings to messy humanity; everything is composted back through nature’s creative destruction, renewal comes through fire and wind and water. This too shall pass and become new.  It will be clear when and how to leave, to judiciously and joyfully end this chapter of our lives. We will eventually be free to fly away but this Earth has taught us that Spirit’s gravity will hold us on course from the inner center of our hearts.

            As I write, I relate more closely to that Germanic soul pioneer Rilke:

“I live my life in widening circles that drift out over the things,

and still I do not know: am I a falcon, a storm, or a continuing great song?

          I remember the simple lines that have taught me often:

“Not perfect, but good enough.”

“Stop! Look! Listen!”  

The same mantras speak. Nothing has really changed.

Carol Kortsch

July 26, 2018