Within the chaos, there has been peace.
And given the amount of chaos, even a few moments of peace amount to a miracle of sorts.
Chaos has been abundant. Probably always is when you move. Contractors who NEVER deliver on schedule. Furniture on a truck stranded miles from where I think that truck should be. Family members installing and breaking and helping. Too many carbs. More checks than I have written in the last ten years combined - most for lots and lots of money and others for nitpicky things like utility deposits and service initiation fees - what a racket. New furniture that has a persistent moldy-like smell. Figuring out how the light switches work.
New people. A robust menstrual cycle that will not give up the ghost despite every biological certainty that I am beyond my child bearing years. Several trips out of state coming up in the next six weeks. Friends and family members going through some challenging things.
But in the midst of it.... there are bunnies who play in my backyard. There is quiet. There are sunset swims and long bike rides. There is yoga at 4 PM. We have been welcomed. Sometimes I look around and just pinch myself. Do I really LIVE here?
The laundry pile is getting higher and I have to go to the grocery store today, so I know that I am not on vacation from the nuts and bolts of life. But even so, I feel deeply at home in this landscape - both the planned and cultivated community and the rugged, untouched desert.
I have felt at home in many landscapes. But the quiet starkness of the desert describes who I am right now in a way that the meadows of the Midwest or the lush, green landscapes of the East coast no longer do. The desert does not embrace - rather, it instructs. "Look," the desert seems to say, "when all seems barren and lifeless and chaotically difficult, there is life. Beautiful, abundant life."
Sounds like home to me.
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