The Roar of the Wind in My Ears

Normally my weeks are paced by days when I don't have any obligations, and punctuated by things I need to be at.

I feel like, until a week into next year, I've been dropped into the headlong rush of constant engagement. I love the holidays, but not this part.

Rehearsals, football games, parades, concerts, appointments with doctors and the spa, on-line courses, hotel reservations, plane tickets, rental cars, highway mileage, Christmas shopping, gift wrapping, shipping and handling, work on the work days, and friends and family on the days I don't work. The last week of this is a vacation in the desert with just me. Sounds like heaven about now, if I can only get there.

A thought sprang up out of my heart a moment ago, as my soul curled into the fetal position and whimpered, "I want to go home." Over and over again. Has it really been so long since I felt this way that it comes as a surprise, or is it that I've felt this way for so long that the litany has become the constant background of my thoughts?

And where is home, if not here? The hills where I grew up? The desire for home pervaded my mind at times even when I lived there. My mother's house, my grandmother's? Where my family is? I love my family, but I feel so distant from them in some ways, even though there's comfort in the way they're always there. Is home where my heart is? My heart has no home. It's not welcome where it wants to be, and it's so tired of searching for a place to rest. Is my only true home in the next world? I could have a long wait, and I'm not a patient person.

The wind of these days is a constant roar in my ears, drowning out and beating down the small things inside. Things happen all around me at the same racing tempo, and they become not changes but a lack of change. Every day there are new things to do, but every day there are things to do, so no day stands above the rest, a goal to reach, a place to pause. There will be days of rest, I know, unseen now, but found again like warm hollows in a winter field. And in these hollows, treasures lie, of love, of hope, of peace, memories to cherish, moments that are, in their own way, a blessed eternity.

But here where I stand now, the wind rushes past me over a vast expanse, featureless and remote. The wind pushes me, stumbling blindly, forward, across the time from now to then.