the pink castle

I wake up and keep my eyes closed

Trolling the space I have left behind in sleep

For dream fragments.

Sometimes I can only find one picture

And I feel the expectation I carry

that anything I find will 

be a key

To the question who am I?

What am I doing here?

The fragment for me is a link I think I need 

to a homeland I have forgotten.

In the past if I couldn’t find anything

It would be one of those days when I got up on the wrong side of the bed,

Disturbed.

I can see now that is a good set up for a “bad day.”

This morning

No clear piece came from dream land.

Though what surprised me was an image from the past.

Dream like, the image rose up 

A girl’s drawing of a pink castle 

I had found her drawing on a rainy walk in Freilassing.

I brought it back to my studio and saved it, laid it out to dry.

I could relate.

When the image came to me this morning my heart was heavy.

They say a man’s home is his castle

But I feel a woman’s home is so very often deeply connected to her life.

Is this true for you?

When life circumstances invite a woman to let that home go

Quite a journey begins.

This morning I am inspired to ponder letting go of my castle,

The land and home on Keyser Run.

Five acres of woods and hills and fields and gardens and paths.

The place a family grew up

The place I was carried through my own initiation as a mother

And wife.

I will take myself through the rooms of that castle in the next days

To find my way home, again.

I have lived in many houses. 

I begin to feel the threads of every home I created.

Whether it was the room of a girl created with the help of my mother's sewing skills 

or the house of a woman or the woodland Hütte of a wild woman on the brink of herself.

Did I ever let them go?

Was I told to let them go?

Do I need to let them go?

In one of the first moves of our Navy family, my Dad said he was proud that I could let go of a pet. He had chosen a career that called for moving, of course he would want this letting go to be learned at an early age. How could he know what else was always working in me if I could not show my feelings?

Now is the time for tears,

they are allowed when they rise. 

I understand them to be signs that something or someone has been loved,

even if it was "just a dream".

I have loved.

This is what matters more than anything, ever. 

In acknowledging these changes and the loss woven into them,

I can acknowledge a love of self and what I have created 

as the expression of home, 

in all the phases of my life. 

And in this silence I can find the key 

that opens the door 

to what lives always already before my ever changing sense of self, 

as girl or woman.