A Tiny Place in a Very Old World

I haven’t written here in a month. I could tell you I’ve been busy. That would be true. I could tell you life got complicated. Also true. But sitting here thinking about it, I realized something else. I’ve been living. Not the big, impressive kind of living. Not vacations and accomplishments and perfectly curated moments. I mean actually living. I’ve been making coffee in the morning and saying my prayers. Writing down the things I’m grateful for. Reading books that make me underline sentences and stare into space for ten minutes afterward. I’ve been walking in the woods. I’ve touched trees. I’ve watched animals move through the world without worrying about whether they are being productive enough. I’ve cooked food with my hands. I’ve cried. I’ve laughed until I couldn’t breathe. I’ve watched my dog become best friends with a neighborhood cat who apparently just decided she belonged to us. And somewhere in the middle of all of that, I started thinking differently about this place we live. Not my house. Not Tennessee… Earth. This ridiculous, ancient, beautiful planet we were somehow lucky enough to wake up on.

I’ve been reading and thinking about people who lived thousands of years before us. About places like Göbekli Tepe and Easter Island. About entire human settlements hidden underneath forests. About civilizations that built things, loved people, buried their dead, cooked meals, told stories and looked at the same moon I look at from my porch. Whole lives happened here before us. Billions of them. And someday ours will be among them.

That thought used to feel a little dark to me. Lately, it feels beautiful. Because maybe the point was never to conquer this place. Maybe it isn’t ours to conquer. Maybe we just get a turn with it. A tiny little turn.

We get a few decades to feel sunshine on our faces. To grow something. To love somebody. To screw things up. To make dinner. To sit beside a fire. To watch a deer disappear into the woods. We get to wonder what the hell any of this means. We get to create things that weren’t here before we arrived. And if we’re paying attention, every once in a while we get to stop in the middle of an ordinary day and realize: Holy shit. I am here.

Maybe that’s what being grounded actually means. Not having everything figured out. Not being peaceful all the time. Not waking up every morning as some enlightened woman who drinks tea and meditates while birds land gently on her shoulders. Please.

Some mornings I am grateful and centered. Other mornings I am irritated before my feet hit the floor. Sometimes I feel deeply connected to everything around me. Sometimes I’m just trying to get through the damn day. But I’m learning to notice. The smell of something cooking on the stove. The way the woods sound early in the morning. A dog stretched across the floor. A cat deciding that apparently she lives here now. The first cool breeze after a Tennessee summer. My own hands covered in paint. The fact that underneath those hands are atoms that have existed for billions of years, temporarily arranged into me.

And apparently if you spend enough time thinking about quantum physics, even the word “temporarily” starts getting complicated. We’ll save that shit for another day.

For now, I think this is enough: I am here. For however long I get. On this strange, ancient, spectacular little planet. And I don’t want to sleepwalk through my turn. I want to touch the trees. I want to make the food. I want to paint the pictures. I want to ask ridiculous questions. I want to love the people and animals who somehow landed in my tiny corner of history. I want to think so hard about my existence that it makes my brain hurt!

I want to notice… Because someday, a very long time from now, everything that feels enormous today will be history too.

So wherever you are today, notice something. Anything. The light through a window. Your dog sleeping. The smell of dinner. A tree you’ve passed a hundred times.

You’re here and that’s pretty fucking incredible.