I spent thirty-two years of my life living in New York City. Those years were some of my life’s most exciting, stimulating, and growing times. I studied music at Columbia University, lived with Howard, a drummer for New York City Opera, for three years, married Bernie, a Jewish lawyer thirty years my senior, and then spent ten years on my own as a single urban woman, becoming a psychotherapist, buying a co-op studio apartment in Greenwich Village, exploring relationships, and learning to support myself. They were years of great delights, challenges, and much learning. I thought I would never leave. I was a New Yorker and always would be.
I left New York to marry my beloved Chris, and then we went on the road in 2005 until he died in 2012. I continued traveling solo for more than two years afterward.
When it was time to find a home, I assumed it would be in a city since I had loved living in New York City for thirty-two years. I started by thinking of moving to Northampton, with a population of 29,000, not the 8.5 million people of New York City, but still a jam-packed city filled with cars, people, restaurants, and cultural activities. But when I thought about my options, I realized I no longer wanted what I had loved in the past.
After ten years of camping, hiking in the mountains, walking among the redwoods, exploring the sandy beaches of the Pacific, and sleeping near the sound of water moving through streams, I knew my city days were over.
I found a house surrounded by woods, next to a running creek, with open sky, butterflies, the sound of birds, and even the occasional visit by a bear, fox, or raccoon. I felt the land calling. I heard the Mother’s voice, calling me to remember that I sprang from the land, not from the busyness of the city.
In the last nine years, I have come to know the cycles of the land. I await the tiny flowers that arise from the snow, the daffodils in early spring, and the mountain laurel in June. My body begins to know these cycles and can rest in knowing that life moves into the maturity of summer, the harvest in the fall, and death in winter. And then, in spring, the cycle of new birth repeats.
This is the truth. Nothing grows and grows forever. Everything dies. Everything that lives and dies becomes the ground for the new in an ever-repeating cycle.
My body has learned this from the land, and this truth comforts me as I move through the cycles of my life.