I arrived home from my October tour with the anticipation of moving into a new house. While I was rambling across the country, Sue was in Asheville, signing papers, and working out the details of buying a house.  For the past six weeks I lived out of a duffel bag. Now, back in Asheville, I will load my earthly possessions into a U-haul and live out of boxes for another couple of weeks while we unpack.

It’s both easy and difficult to buy a house. The easy part are the real estate agents who fall over themselves to sell you something, and the bank; no matter what your financial situation, they move heaven and earth to make you eligible to purchase the house of your dreams.  The hard part is after you’ve signed your life away, and everyone pockets their take, you find yourself sitting alone (or alone with your partner) on a heap of boxes in the living room confronted with what to do next.  The whole place has to be scrubbed from top to bottom, painted, deodorized, demoldified; and a myriad of tiny things that you’d never see in the lovers-high of courting a new abode: slanting floors, cracks in walls, leaky basement, and traffic noise from the road that seemed further away just a couple of weeks ago, feel so much larger than they really are.  The emotion associated with this is called “buyers remorse.” It’s quite common, I hear.

Through the years of setting up home in different places I’ve found a theory that’s helped me understand the psychological effects of moving.  We human beings are like trees. Though our roots are invisible, we have roots none-the-less. These roots sink down into the earth wherever we live and bring psycic and emotional nourishment up into our bodies. When we transplant to another location our roots are severed and to some extent we experience trauma. When we are, in effect, replanted, it takes time for our roots to find their way back into new soil and establish new conduits of life force.  I have found it takes between one to two years to really feel my own roots become fully integrated with their new environment.

The act of investing yourself into a place helps exercise this intention: digging gardens, planting trees, mowing the lawn, scrubbing floors, and painting walls, all help immensely.  The wheel has to be reinvented. All those piddley little things that we do every day have to find a new path. A simple trip to the grocery store or post office entails breaking old habits and establishing new ones. 

I find my life doubling back on itself in a kind of deja vu.  My days of living in Vermont off the grid, building furniture, planting gardens, and erecting stone walls return to me in body memory. This actually feels good, as that’s a time of my life that I cherish, and learned an incredible amount from.  I think that the reason the songs I wrote for my first album Elemental Lullabye were so vital is because of the quality of integration I had with my Vermont homestead. There was a quiet and focus that, I think, all of us long for that I experienced for a number of months there. It’s strange how fleeting these things can be as the fruition of those songs propelled me away from their source and onto the road. It reminds me of stories about a Buddhist monk who after learning essential spiritual lessons in the monastery was told that the only way to really practice them was to go out into the world.

We’re learning about downtown Marshall too. This little mountain town is the seat of Madison County - a dry county, its grand domed courthouse overlooking the French Broad River and backed up against a steep rocky hill. The single main street in town runs parallel with the railroad tracks and the river. Upon it reside the post office, an oldtimey hardware store, a car dealership, county welfare services, a café, and a clothing store that sells vegetables from boxes out front. They say this area is up-and-coming, it being only a half hour out of Asheville. We don’t mind one way or another. We’re here, and we’ll take it like it is.

So today, for the first time, I observed a cardinal at the bird feeder helping himself to the black oil seed I set out more than a week ago. I’m sure it’s been months since seed or bird has graced the feeder  - like water and animal returned to an oasis gone dry. A patch of purple pansies is blooming in the yard, which is strange because it has been so cold here lately. It’s nice to see some color in the drab December yard. 

Thanks again for reading - keep in touch!