Promised Land

There is a lake in Pennsylvania that has been calling me back for years. It sits inside a state park called Promised Land. I always knew the name. It just took years for the meaning to catch up with it.

This time it was early. Cool. The rain had stopped only hours before. I was back by the lake, in the quiet corner that has somehow become my place.

The birds were loud that morning, closer than usual. The sky was doing that thing it does over water, wide and low at the same time. A cool wind came off the lake, carrying the scent of wet earth, the forest, and the mountains. The soil beneath me was still damp from yesterday's rain. I didn't do anything. I just sat.

This past month, I had crossed oceans. Cities, countries, time zones, until my body forgot which one it was in. I had been up early and up late, in one language and then another, in one version of myself and then another. I didn't feel lost, exactly. I felt scattered. Like I had left small pieces of myself in each place and hadn't collected them back.

Then the lake. Then the birds. Then the soil, holding me the way it always does. And something in me came back together. Not all at once. Just enough to recognize myself again.

Then, in the distance, a heron lifted into the morning sky.

She had been standing on one leg at the water's edge for so long that I had almost stopped watching her. And then she moved. Unhurried. Like she had somewhere to be and all the time in the world to get there. I watched her until she disappeared behind the trees.

For just a moment, I could see myself differently. We belonged to the same morning.

Rainer Maria Rilke wrote something that I keep returning to in moments like this:

Ah, not to be cut off

not through the slightest partition

shut out from the law of the stars.

The inner, what is it?

if not intensified sky,

hurled through with birds and deep

with the winds of homecoming.

Not to be cut off. That's it exactly.

I think I spend much of my life a little cut off. Moving between places, cultures, versions of myself, and sometimes losing, somewhere in the moving, the thread that connects me to the sky and the birds and the stars.

And then a morning like this one.

And the thread is there again.

I know now where to come back to. The sound of the birds. The wind off the water.

The damp soil beneath me after the rain.

Sometimes it's a lake.

Sometimes it's a poem.

This morning, it was enough.

The lake. The birds. Me.