[Looks like the cat is doing his job! Around The Table Farm, Poulsbo, WA (small scale organic farming)]
[My beautiful Burns, nine months pregnant, in her incredible little garden.]
[Me and the barnacles. Bainbridge Island, WA]
Last week, I spent five days in the Puget Sound, my last trip to the coast for the season. It was delightful. I popped into the city to meet up with a couple of friends and their lovely spouses, enjoyed fine food, plant shopping, and various other city things before catching the ferry over to the quiet, clean of Bainbridge Island to stay with my tribe there for a few days. I have to tell you, there is really nothing more easy, more filling for the soul, then to simply be with people who know you full well, inside and out. I’ve been going to Bainbridge Island for eleven years now! I’m practically local! And I love my people there, so dearly and tenderly. I love to arrive at their homes and be swept up into the beauty of their lives.
When I arrived in Seattle, I was fostering a feeling of lostness, deep in my soul. I felt wavering, directionless, floundering on the edge of transition in so many avenues of life. By the time I left Bainbridge Island, the last of a subtle and surly weight had lifted from my shoulders, swept away by the careful and courageous hands of justice, truth and epiphany. I am ready to go home now, home to Idaho, home to my winter life. When we arrived in the Methow Valley for the start of the fire season, I was bone tired and soul exhausted after two very strenuous years of studio work and the regular wear and tear that stems from brushing up against the darker sides of human nature. I knew the Methow Valley would be a healing room for me, it had to be, or I wouldn’t be able to go on. All those days I spent lakeside with a book in the dapple of tree shade, all those days I woke early and took long walks in the hills, all those days I spent entire afternoons simply stringing colored glass beads on thin thread, I was on an important threshold of restoration. I am so very glad to tell you I am ready to go home, move forward into the next segment, delve into a season of experimentation and discovery with my creative work, photography and writing…and who knows what else! I am refreshed. I am prepared, so fully, so suddenly, to pour myself out once more (the filling took such a long while, I was so dreadfully empty) and it feels so good and strong to have officially turned the last corner on a path that leads to rejuvenation.
I have one week of work left in my tidy little Airstream studio. I have ten more days to adore my little cabin in the woods. Then we’ll shoot like a silver star, blazing joyfully, home to our people in Pocatello and our little farm house on the edge of the mountains. The timing is perfect. I don’t want to go. But I’m ready to leave. I’m ready now.
Thanks for being with me in this season, in the seasons past, in the seasons to come. I hope you are turning the same kind of corners, on a continual basis, unshackling yourself from dead weight, lassoing humility and grace, feeling a lift of spirit, a decompression of soul, the hope that comes with renewal and the blessing of rightness. Good things are coming. I can feel it on the breeze.
