Village Evenings

  

          I have been sitting out in the long twilight here at Unity Village, watching the fireflies and a cat-sized rodent who I understand is the local woodchuck (looks like a cross between a prairie dog and a beaver, with more on the beaver side.) The weather has been muggy and warm, though not as warm as tomorrow will be. My room, gratefully borrowed from a dear friend for a couple of weeks, is cool with the air conditioner, but small enough that sanity requires a brief stroll now and then to clear the cobwebs.

            Its been a good time, even this first week. I’ve settled in, paid my Unity bill, started my writing class with a teacher whose books are favorites of mine. What a joy! I’ve looked at various types of housing for the fall and sent off resumes’ for jobs. I even walked over three miles this morning, although I didn’t intend it to be that far, and my arthritic hip and knee aren’t happy about it. 

            It was a beautiful walk, along the upper meadow, through the woods, and along the lake – I saw many different trees and flowers strange to these western eyes. There are bluebirds, tons of robins, deer, and frogs as well. Those I know. I can hear many unknown bird calls, too, with only the robins and the chickadees as familiar notes. The cicada’s are beginning to come out, and in later weeks will be deafening in volume. Not yet, thankfully. There is even an exquisite black-winged damselfly that hangs out around the creek that runs through Unity Village: very lovely, very fragile-looking, black wings with white dots on the end. I wanted to photograph everything and write a book, “Wildlife at Unity.” So much of Unity is these woods, lakes, and meadows…

            But as I sit here tonight in the apricot haze of a Missouri sunset, I can’t help thinking about how I have come to be here. From the time of my calling to ministry to this day, I haven’t changed course; instead, I have opened up wide to meet an unknown future. It has been a fact of my life, this coming; unavoidable, unmovable, and surprising...not easy, and I certainly wasn’t very patient with many parts of the process, but I’m here, and my inner being acknowledges this reality.  My heart and spirit may be in my White Mountain home, but a part of me claims the Village as its bedrock, even with my passion for the west.

            Through this process, I have changed, more than at any other point in my life. Opening up to others; indeed, opening up to life has been part of it, exposing the conflicting pushes and pulls of my inner being. Expansive yet still shy, warm and loving yet still solitary, gregarious on the one hand and a hermit on the other; intellectually curious, poking at ideas and submitting them to my own inner truth-sense, yet still wrapping them with intense feeling, allowing their ability to carry whatever they claim to resonate within me or fail in the process. There’s a lot going on in my interior, and I’m grateful for the solitude to let it work itself out.

            I miss my home and my partner, yet I need the Village. I need this space, this place.

            And so it is.