There's No Place Like Home

From my perch in the writing room I can hear the gulls on the island out in the lake. They amass there every morning and evening with the cormorants, from a distance the small isolated land mass appears to be white rather than simply covered in living, screaming sea birds.

Che, Stella and I were down at the beach last night as the sun went down and the almost full moon hovered over the bay, lighting the ripples on the water, turning the waves from the passing boats into slivers of liquid silver. The gulls were loud then to and I closed my eyes, grounded in the pebbles on the shore, to listen.

Before the beach the pups and I had hit the Superior Hiking Trail for the second time that day for a post dinner walk. I had eaten an entire frozen pizza to myself, comfort food for a tired and blissed out body, and was not quite ready for a food coma. I was breathing in and out deeply as we walked the trail, feeling the full expansion of my abdomen and its cargo, remembering why I usually take better care not to stuff myself to over flowing.

Food baby or not, I was alive and the sun was setting over the tree tops. I could hear the water rushing over rock; the pups meandering on ahead, Stella stopping periodically to turn and make sure that I was still upright and following behind. It was a beautiful evening.

I found myself over flowing with gratitude on that trail, on the beach, on the road as I passed neighbors who waved and called to the dogs and this morning, when I woke up, the gratitude was present again.

The sky was overcast and a cool breeze was blowing in my window. Che and Stella were asleep on my legs not yet aware that I was stirring. There was a smell in the air, something between a rustic cabin and freshly laundered sheets that had been hung outside to dry and I inhaled one deep breath and then another.

Later as I put the kettle on for tea, I smiled as I stood in the warm embrace of the kitchen knowing that before too long there would be plentiful fires in the woodstove and flannel shirts, socks and hats.

I love this simple life. This simple life where there is an abundance of time and space to simply walk or simply listen. There is time to tinker with projects around the house, time to garden, time to be...time to be in which there is no time.

This morning I find myself feeling grateful that I often don't know the date or what day it is. I don't have to rise to an alarm clock but rather allow the birds or the dogs to rouse me from my slumber; the schedule I keep is by choice rather than something that is imposed on me from the outside, it has its own gentle rhythm.

I am settling into the patterns, bobbing in the waves, breathing in the lake breeze, surrendering to the process in the quiet, lovely, natural surroundings of the country; blissed out, full, expanding.

"Ironically, rural America has become viewed by a growing number of Americans as having a higher quality of life not because of what it has, but rather because of what it does not have!" ~Don A. Dillman

"Gratitude unlocks the fullness of life. It turns what we have into enough, and more. It turns denial into acceptance, chaos to order, confusion to clarity. It can turn a meal into a feast, a house into a home, a stranger into a friend. Gratitude makes sense of our past, brings peace for today and creates a vision for tomorrow."
-Melody Beattie