The Return

We came back with the part of us that was here all along.

We came back different than we left. Not someone else. More ourselves.

We had gone to find a part of us we had set down without meaning to, in a life that asked for everything and left little time for the asking. It was not lost. It was where we had left it, waiting with the patience of things that do not leave.

We stayed until we knew it again. And in the knowing, something in us settled that had been unsettled a long time.

Now it comes with us. Not as a thought we had in a quiet hour, but as ourselves, walking back into the morning and the inbox and the long drive and the dishes left in the sink. The same hours. Met with the whole of what we are.

This is the return. We do not have to step out of our lives to be whole within them. We are whole and in our lives at once, and the two stop competing.

We feel it in the body first. The shoulders that come down from around our ears. The breath that arrives a little deeper, without our asking. The self we tended in the quiet does not stay in the quiet. It moves out into the hands and the hours, into everyone we meet.

The mornings will still ask for us. The work will still be waiting. The people we love will still need us. We meet them now with the part of us that was missing from the table for so long.

That is the whole of it. We go inward not to stay, but to come back with ourselves, and to give that self to the life we are already living.

In returning,
S. Marie
C U M I C H E

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The Breath, of returning

Take one breath before you move into what comes next. Let it be enough to notice that you are here. Nothing more is required of it.

The Line

What I have found here, and want to take with me, is ______.

The Tending

There will still be days when you feel far from yourself. The way back does not disappear on those days. You know it well enough now to find it in the dark.

Come here when you want to remember what you know. Stay for a moment. Then go back to the life waiting for you.

The interior goes with you.