In the soft light of morning, I know it is time to move my laptop, coffee and phone to the couch, wrap our soft green blanket around my shoulders, turn up the heat, open the shades for the window right beside me (leaving the others closed as a kind of protective womb, a shelter from the world) listen to soft, sweet music and experience gratitude as easily as I breathe. I am in my nest, a place I haven’t been able to appreciate for months, though it has been here all along.
I was not ready. Too much to do, not enough order, and my mind was unsettled, so I have been at the dining room table for two seasons, ready to tend and doing so. But the table is not so much a place of gentleness as it is a place of getting-done. Even healing is more intense there (when the tears come I strain to grasp the concrete nature of what has changed, not realizing I don’t need to grasp anything, just be, just be).
The boys sleep in and I am peacefully wrapped in slow quiet. Hours pass in this seemingly timeless haven. One child wakes up and I ask him to honor the calm he has just entered. After a few words of frustration, he settles in to play with Legos and together we ease back into silence. His brother wakes as morning is about to slide into afternoon. I kiss cheeks, draw long hair away from small faces, say a few words, but only a few, then return to my nest.