There has been a thought eddying around the fringes of my mind these days and it revealed itself in astonishing clarity last night under a starlit drive home. This simple poem speaks to the felt awareness and experience of this being at a time and stage in life where we may feel that we want to return home, not necessarily, but not excluding, a specific person or place, but to a childhood innocence and soul connection. Perhaps it was once felt in another, perhaps not, but even so, there is a longing for it.

The further afield we go adventuring into the world, there seems to be this moment in our lives where one turns around and there is this desire to return home. I wonder if it is that which informs, with no uncertain clarity, where and how we now want to live and the people we finally surround ourselves with in this later time of life.. it all becomes more authentic and distilled somehow. I see this now so clearly, in that wonderful deep connection felt when in the presence of a parent and child together just starting out 💗💗

♥

Our Place of Origin

After all of this,
home reveals itself,
as just a simple doorway
back, to where we began.

A front porch,
A garden swing
That prairie hike with
Hands held tight.

Peace, then, fully found
in this space where we
first imagined, where all
was formed in quiet scent and touch.

That place we were keen
to leave behind,
our optical prisms
set on distant sky’s cusp
and rushing forward time.

Years of beloved adventures taken,
until this curious hard struck
bargain to go back,
to reverse it all.

Astonished to find, after all
we’ve discovered, through
all of the desire and
all of the longing,

was this wish to simply
return to our true North,
to our place of origin,
our true home within.

No stranger
to this person we once were,
we can easily imagine and
we make it so again.

Barbara Barry, February 23, 2025