The Long Journey Home

We have all heard it said that life is a journey, and so it is We often travel through our days blindly when life is busy or decide to loose who we really are in listening to what is being said in our times regarding what we need to be or should be. My husband is a wise wise man. He has been telling me for years to just dig deep down inside myself and remember who I was before I started listening to all the rhetoric out there. Looking back for me, meant looking way back, back to when I was just forming my own personal philosophy about life, people and what really matters. That was about 40 years ago, when I so prized individuality and walking my own path. I recently read through some of my journals that I kept as a teenager, and they were not filled with the day to day trivial stuff or who had crushes on who, but the pages were filled with musings on life and discoveries. I wrote about the need to be still, to step off the beaten path and find the less travelled one, where my thoughts could be my own, my "truth" be my truth.

When Emery met me, I was still holding on to that cherished dream of living in the woods in solitude. I was still wearing flannel shirts and jeans, feet clad in wool socks and earth shoes. Hair long and any tee shirt I wore was meaningful. He fell in love with me just as I was. No pretending on either side for us. We were comfortable and real with who we were and knew within a few dates that we were soul mates. Each day of our 32 years together has gotten better and our love grown to a point that we feel a sense of loss any second we are not together. Yet, there is no suffocated feeling, no yearning for our own time. Hard to explain actually.

But somewhere along that way in my search for some spiritual peace, I just kept finding myself in a loop of rules and regulations that I never could live with. Eventually loosing who I was in the process. Its only been in the past few months that I have found my way home to peace within on a level that I have not known for years. I have in a sense come all the way back home to where I started the journey. Seeking once again the depth of serenity found in a life uncomplicated with rules and agendas thrown at me from people not on my walk, not on my journey. Funny thing, the catalyst for finding my way back to who I really am came from making dolls for my grand-daughters...these dolls, so natural and wonderful awakened in me a time and place so long ago when I was making them for my daughters. The journey has been a walk around a labyrinth of life, where steps retraced take me to the very place I have always meant to be. A life of simplicity and full of peace and serenity....happiness found in a depth I never knew possible.

Melissa's doll, well loved, well played with, mouth gone, clothes faded, sock missing, hair thin. This wool stuffed doll, made so long ago, has taken me back to a time and place I was meant to cherish and nurture always, but I lost my way until now.