28 November 2008

songs of geese

Migrating geese fly low over my house, their noise a jumbled clamor that belies the orchestrated flight. After a flash of sunlight and warm rain last week, the cold season has settled in with morning fog and frost on the rooftops. Yesterday there was winter rain, a soaking mist that chills you straight through.

It took at least five winters here in the Pacific Northwest to acclimate from the dry bluster of the high mountain desert. As a result of a military father and my own unsettled youth, I grew up without a geographic identity and did not expect to stay when I first landed in Portland, the city lights out the window of the plane that night reflecting off so much water I thought was surely the sea.

More than thirteen years and change that has occurred for me at a deep and fundamental level has also given me roots. Even as I have been blessed with abiding friendships from around the world and recent opportunity to travel to the beautiful UK and distant reaches of the North American continent, it is the myriad of grays in the skies of Washington that I mean when I say home.

I continue to write with gratitude for the experiences that contribute to my vision so that those odd, endearing details that make us so very human might reveal the order to our own cacophonous song.

Awareness is a gift from the universe. To translate it to words is an ongoing challenge.

Sherri

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