(I apologize in advance for tired metaphors, but they’re what come to mind now…)
Life events have me thinking a lot lately about where I choose to live.
The east coast is my heart. When I drive through the landscape, the light, the terrain, the deciduous trees are just as they should be at each moment of the year. Street signs are the proper color. I live half an hour from where I went to college, three hours from where I went to high school. The people, all my people, either live here or return here on a regular basis. Overlapping memories are attached to every location, sound and smell. I feel comfort here.
I never even went there until I was over twenty years old, but the west coast is my soul. The evergreen trees, the wetness in the air, the height and hugeness of nature. It is familiar in a way that is beyond memory, being there feels like plugging into something that was mine before birth. The people I meet there are all people who decided to go west. They are people like me, we have no shared history but a shared present, and perhaps future. It is a hymn, I have an actual physical sensation of uplifting when I am there.
Is it possible for your heart and soul to be rooted in the same place? I wonder how people who are lucky enough to be born in San Francisco, Portland or Seattle feel. Are they complete, with no division of loyalty within them? Or do they in turn long for something else, somewhere else?
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I love this. My heart and soul are both in the Pacific Northwest, even though I didn’t come here until I was 30, and did so totally on a whim because I thought I would like it from what I read on the internet. I think it’s partly because it took the pieces of where I grew up that were in my heart (the trees; the body of water that never ended; the cold, rocky shoreline) and married them with a place that I could love with all of me.