It always was the image of the sun cracking through the eastern mountains that kept me alive last year.

I would sit in six degree water at the sauna and let my body become something else. I would let that vision meld with the cold into one clear image and all the fear would have to leave me and I would become one thing of intense will. My backbone steel - my mind clear and I could see the vision of what now stands in front of me here: East light coming through onto my front porch from the mountains.

Last year this image was an internal way of holding myself, now on the land proper I’m still learning to give my body over to her - to choose to spend an Easter alone here - when all my family and friends have social events. My heart is breaking and being reborn. There is a lot of pain and a lot of longing - something I am patiently wading through, tempering myself through. It’s the hardest passage I’ve known in my middle years - it’s wound work, it’s soul birthing again as a conscious adult and I choose it - say yes to it even as tears flow and I struggle with the everyday motions of staying with the garden, keeping the children fed and watered - and loving them as they unfurl in their own ways.

It is still a good life.

It is where I am supposed to be right now - and this is the main thing - just being here for that.