Back Home from MFA Residency, Safety Tracks, Changes A-Coming

I'm home from Tacoma: arrived to find Anchorage gray, teeming with rain, just as it was when I left. 

By the evening, when I got to Homer, it was dry and sunny, and had apparently been that way most of the time I was gone. By the next morning, though, the rain had followed me down from Anchorage and it's been just pouring ever since.

The deluge feels apt for my arrival back into this home life, after two weeks of intense, stimulating, exciting interactions with a whole cast of new friends, people whom I hope I'll know for the rest of my life. People among whom I felt safe to deliver a poem from memory, standing on my head, as part of the revelry on the last night before we dispersed.

Could anyone living here make sense of that? 

And how amazing is it, coming from that context, that this is my home?

 Everything has grown up like crazy over the past two weeks. I'm particularly pleased to see such prolific raspberries, after the ravages of the snowshoe hares this past winter--

 --many canes have even set fruit.

The re-entry into "this" life from "that" is messy around the edges, of course. I return home with many more ties to people, many more books (and a renewed anxiety about where to keep them in this tiny space) and a whole program of study ready to unfold in collaboration with my new mentor. The 'mentor assignments' were one of the most talked-about elements of the program for my cohort: for many, there was a lot of excitement and speculation about who they would end up working with in such close concert for this year. I was a little different: I didn't have a strong feeling about any possible individual. Instead, I felt sure that anyone I ended up with would be fantastic and that there were no bad choices: a pretty great way to feel. So I was delighted when I was assigned Stephen Corey, best known as editor of the Georgia Review but a wonderful poet and essayist too, whom I'd experienced by then as a compelling teacher with a whip-keen, wry sense of humor.

I have work to do, and I have support and validation for doing that work. This is probably the most important thing that I bring home with me in terms of its impact on my home life. It feels sort of apt that I saw my therapist in Anchorage right off the plane and then my Naturopath in Homer as soon as I got back. With support, I can stay on the rails. It's alarming to me that conversely, when I wasn't seeing them so often earlier this summer, I started to go off those rails.

This writing commitment is getting big--and I want it to flourish like this horseradish I planted last year, turning into a perennial, luxuriant, pungent monster.

Two-gallon watering can is there for scale.

Fall is coming. The fireweed is just about bloomed out. Red berries everywhere. The nettles are purple with exhaustion and the watermelon berries are ripe.

I see some changes a-coming: for this blog, for this life. I'm still 'betwixt and between,' so I don't have full clarity on what those changes will be but it's not exaggerating to say that the very existence and character of this blog, among other things, are up in the air. More soon when I know it.
Much love.