Knowing My Place

The day it became the vaguest possibility I might leave Sacramento, I started to walk the place I had called home for twenty years.  For almost ten years, six days a week, sometimes seven, I circumambulated my neighborhood and learned it as intimately as a woman can learn something she loves.  I saw it in every season.  I saw it at different hours.  I knew how it grew peopled with the weekends and the cooler weather, how cold and heat made it silent as a graveyard.  I knew what birds came when.  I knew my place even as I was questioning my place, wondering if it had ever been my place, wondering if places could change, if we could change.

I will admit there were times I thought I was walking myself so deeply into that land and life that there would never be any escape.  And there were just as many times when I wondered if I was walking every bit of that place out of me so I could be free to find my self and my place now, not as I was when I settled in Sacramento, on Sacramento, back in the late seventies, but as I was now.  In fact I will tell you that I wasn't at all sure which it was until one day, I knew almost without a doubt I was unraveling myself so I could go.

Those of you who know me, know I had a dream in the hospital after my heart attack, a long dream that came with every sleep cycle, lingered even when I was awake, walking the halls as they make you walk, to set the return to life they've given back to you.  In that dream I walked the desert for days until I came to a ring of stones, white as chalk, oddly shaped like blocks on thin stalks.  I passed at the ring for long time before I understood what I was to do.  And then I began walking counterclockwise, past each stone, past each marker of my life so far, back to my beginnings, so I could walk it again, as if a life was truly a labyrinth and we walking the same path, finding ourselves back where we started, knowing ourselves, as T.S. Eliot wrote, for the first time.  I had many interpretations for that dream, and like all great dreams, powerful visions, it continues to advise and inform me still, years after my heart attack.  I see that I could not have made the leap to love, to a new life, to do it as fresh as 54 can be fresh, new enough, malleable enough to come to love willing to do things differently this time.

So now I am learning a new place, a place that is mine for now and maybe for a year from now, or two, or three, but then another place will be mine, and maybe another after that.  Perhaps I have come to a turtle place where I carry enough of home with me so that everywhere can be home and no place must be walked into the very bones and breath of me before I can feel safe and sound.  Perhaps I no longer have to know my place, set my life and myself in stone.  It sure would be nice to think so.  And just newly turned 54, I think that's what I'm going to believe.