Go or Stay?

Spring                                                     Bee Hiving Moon

“Each of us must confront our own fears, must come face to face with them. How we handle our fears will determine where we go with the rest of our lives. To experience adventure or to be limited by the fear of it.”   Judy Blume, Tiger Eyes

I have a friend, he knows who he is, who loves to pack up and go.  Stay a good while.  Then come back.  He has tales to tell, too.  That time in the Caribbean when he thought he was going to die in a bad storm.  Selling art in the Greek Islands to make money.  Learning Fiji and Hindi while in the Peace Corps.  Tai Chi while living in Shanghai.  Creating an exhibit on safe sex for Thai kids.  Tango in Buenos Aires.  Gunplay in Mexico.

I don’t know about fear, but he sure loves change.  “Change is good,” he said, “I look forward to it.”

Since he began the pick up and go live in a foreign city idea a few years back, I’ve often compared my life choices to his.  It goes like this.  Am I too timid?  Stuck in one place?

I try to answer this question honestly because the answer matters to me.  Travel is part of my soul, too, and I love foreign travel most of all.  His choices seem to maximize the experience of being in another culture, being there long enough to sink into the culture, be part of it.  At least for a while, not just as wanderer from one place to another.

My answer to these questions goes like this.  I moved so much after I left home at 17.  Off to college, to a different college, back home for a quarter, then out for good.  New York for three months.  Another town.  6 months.  Wisconsin. a year or so.  Bought a house.  Moved to New Brighton for sem.  Moved into St. Paul.  Bought a farm, moved up there.  Sold it.  Back to Minneapolis to a residential hotel, the Mark Twain.  Move to Centerville.  Back to Minneapolis, Stevens Square.  Out of Stevens Square to Loring Park.  Loring Park to the Cooper Neighborhood.  There to Sargent Ave in St. Paul.  From there to Irvine Park in St. Paul.  After that Edgcumbe Road, Highland, St. Paul.

Then, 18 years ago.  Andover.  Where I’ve stopped moving.  Kate and I put several thousand dollars into landscaping when we bought this place.  We wanted to enjoy it as we lived here.  That brought me into gardening, first perennial bulbs, then other plants in large three-tiered amphitheatre shaped beds rising above our patio, then to the front beds (5) and then after that clearing out a grove of scraggly black locust (thorny and weed like though excellent for fence posts).  Various experiments in that area until we settled on raised beds and vegetable gardening.

Three or four years ago we hired Ecological Gardens to put in a small orchard and to do some additional work in the vegetable garden areas.  We fenced these two in to keep the dogs out.  About the same time I began to keep bees.

We’ve shaped this house into a place supportive of our creative work:  Kate’s sewing/quilting and my writing/research.  It fits us and undergirds our lives.  In my mind what we’ve done here is gone deep, rooted ourselves in a place.  That’s not to say we don’t get out.  We did tour Latin America last fall and we’ve been many other places.

So, my answer to those questions is that my need was to make a home, a place that could support my life and my family’s.  It does have losses.  Kate and I don’t have the pick-up and go options we might in another living situation, but, on the other hand, we have seasonal opportunities for spiritual replenishment.  We also have a space that encourages us to create.

In sum then, I don’t believe I’m too timid, nor stuck in one place.  It’s a choice and a good one for me.