Now the city’s just a prison without fences

His job is just a routine he can’t stand

And at night he dreams of wide open spaces

Fresh dirt between his toes and on his hands.

Alabama Clay, Garth Brooks

I’m a long way from hayfield walks and front porch musings. That time of my life seems like someone else’s. As I reminisce on those ancient days, it’s like finding vestiges of some foreign, long-ago existence during an archeological dig.

I feel pulled to that long-ago existence. The pull, the longing to go back home is visceral. I feel it in my bones. Can place be etched in our DNA? My grandmother’s porch, the hayfield hikes, woolly bear covered roads like the wrinkle under my left eye, the color of my hair, and the protruding of my ribs, all indelible marks on the body of my soul making me who I am and who I am supposed to be.

I want to go back home. Back to the beginning. Being home is when everything around you feels right and whole. Home is upstate New York: wide open spaces, fresh air, friendly people, and enough dirt to grow a small orchard and some blueberry bushes. That’s my dream.

Like the lyric, I feel imprisoned by a city that’s too boxed-in in the most important ways: space, mindset, values, community, and possibility. You have to be right in the right ways.

In my 20’s and 30’s, I bought into the thinking that I had to have the right career, the right politics, the right look, the right salary, the right whatever-is-en-vogue at the moment. This mindset traps a lot of people, and for me at least, cleaved me away from myself. I chased things that truly meant nothing to me and strived for things I really didn’t want.

For a long time, I loved the city. I loved city living. How convenient to be able to walk anywhere and to have a Target, grocery store, or cafe within a 2 mile radius of any place I lived. And now, I don’t give a f@*% about any of that. I want something else, and it ain’t nothing like what’s here.

My values haven’t shifted. They’ve always been there; unchanging and true. I had to consider other ways of being before I trusted my own, original way of being. It may have taken a while, but the certainty and confidence with which I now walk toward my goals is priceless. It doesn’t matter what anyone else thinks or does because I’m on the road back to myself, my family, and all the unquantifiable, inexplicably marvelous things life, the earth, and the universe have yet to show me…and I am so happily and gratefully ready for it.

Listen to the story told by the reed, of being separated. “Since I was cut from the reed bed, I have made this crying sound. Anyone apart from someone he loves understands what I say. Anyone pulled from a source longs to go back.”

The Reed Flute’s Song, Rumi