You can go home again, regardless of how much has changed. Your energy is forever in your footsteps, left on that land, & the energy of that place is forever in you. No matter where I travel on this planet or how many fascinating things I witness in other cultures and lands, “home” to me will forever be the land I grew up on, where I walked barefoot as a child, as a teen, as a woman. With every step, I sowed my own energy into the ground, leaving it there to mingle with the footsteps of my ancestors who walked this land when it was nothing but virgin forests.
When I walk there now, it strikes me how much has changed in my own lifetime. It’s my chance to worship in the Cathedral of Nature because I see how Nature reclaims its own. The hundreds-year-old oaks that once stood in a cluster around the pond that was dug when I was a tiny girl are mostly just stumps now, rotting, some filled with beehives, and some covered in vines as a mother pulls a soft blanket over a weary, sleeping baby. But the grass still thrives. The wildflowers still thrive. The huge trees that once dotted the land and fell to random lightning bolts throughout my youth are gone, replaced by commercial timber in places. But the lightning bugs still dot the sky on October nights on the hill where those trees once stood and where grandfathers of mine slipped away to play cards deep in the woods.
Farmers still work the land next door and parts of the farm itself where I grew up. Cotton, corn, soybeans, peanuts–I recognize the smell of them the moment I get my first whiff of South Georgia when I go back to visit. Throughout the years, I’ve had a love-hate relationship with my hometown, but more so with small-minded people there or crazy relatives. Never with the land. I’ve always felt close to it, close to Nature, close to Deity–more than in any church or circle. The dust of home is in my blood, in my dust.
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