Vibrant Village ™

I think there are many ways to think of “coming home” and one way, it occurred to me, is that if you can have a sense of being centered, you’ve “come home.”

By feeling grounded and connected, it may not matter where you are physically--you can feel at home anywhere, as long as that inner part of you is focused and calm.  Here’s my column on “internally coming home!”

I wake up, invigorated, with many ideas of how the day can go. My energy roils and rolls, springing me out of bed, eager to get started. I run down the list: go running with my dog, water and weed the garden, kayak to Phillips Island, boogie board at the beach, organize and pay the month’s bills, clean the house that so desperately needs it.

My son is away for a week, I am between work contracts, and today I have no demands on my time—the day belongs totally to me to do with as I wish.

Come rock a while

But then a funny thing happens. I make my ritual cup of tea and saunter out to my front porch rocking chair. I fill the bird feeder, and then sink into the same rocking chair that I sit in every morning.  On my lap is a copy of Newsweek. I read a bit of this magazine, whose material provides serious thinking and strong opinions about what is going on in our world.

I read—just a bit.  Usually a sentence of a paragraph strikes me in some random way—triggering a thought, teasing out something I have read somewhere else (oh, where was that?), or sometimes surfacing an almost-visceral memory that torments me in trying to become real, so that I can latch onto it with an “Oh, yes, that thing that happened—I need to think more about it.”

Sometimes it’s the beginning of a good idea; sometimes it’s the kernel for an essay; sometimes it’s nothing more than a random, enjoyable thought.  But the thing that matters most—the thing that I am really trying to get at here—is that I am sitting in my rocking chair on my front porch, my wake-up list forgotten.

I’m rocking, very slowly, thinking about things that I often don’t have time to think about.  Taking the time to read about what’s going on around me in the bigger world. And the bigger world is important, because it’s how we are all connected.

But so is the smaller world—and when a neighbor wanders by and interrupts my solitude and sometimes focused thinking, it’s a good thing.

We talk about the weather, about the best fishing and who is catching what where, about local happenings and doings, and which ones we need to attend. And I am reminded that reading and thinking about the big world is good and important, but living in my own small everyday world is good and important, too.  And really living in it—not moving through it at 95 miles per hour, leaping out of bed with a task-list so long it would cause a Prime Minister to falter.

Taking the time to sit on my front porch and watch the birds at the feeder. Listening to my neighbor share his dreams of buying an RV and travel the country, and maybe end up in the Pacific Northwest. Or, he says “at the very end—you know, when I’m almost done, down in Mexico on the beach where it’s warm all the time.”  And he doesn’t mean when he’s almost done with the trip. He means when he’s “done” done.

Me, I don’t want to wait until I am almost “done.” I don’t want to save the best for last.  I want the best now. I want to parse it out, a little every day.  And the best for me is sitting, just sitting and contemplating, every morning on my front porch--and slowly sliding into the day.

Dail spent much of her growing up time in Carteret County, North Carolina. In 1984, Dail became a Foreign Fisheries Observer with the National Marine Fisheries Service based in Seattle. In 2008, after many years in the Pacific Northwest, and several years living overseas, Dail returned home to North Carolina and Beaufort, NC. The coast of North Carolina is where she feels most at home.