living in the south

I never expected to love the South. 

I resisted coming back to the east coast as a whole for a long time. 

“I’m a west coast person”, I told myself. 

I belong on the west coast. 

It’s where more people ‘like me’ live. 

But, I was born on the east coast. 

There is something for me here. 

And once I was able to let enough of that resistance to my past dissolve… 

I heard the call to come back. Back east. And to the South, of all places. 

It made no sense to my intellectual self, but I listened. Because on a deeper level, I saw and knew that this was something I wanted to follow, even if it scared me. This was my next step. 

My mind had many ideas of what the South was before even visiting. 

Ideas that I picked up from culture, from the news. 

Many of them shattered when I moved here. 

I was not told about the sweet hum of Southern magic. 

The way time seems slower here. 

I did not expect the South to feel so warm, so alive. 

I did not expect to be so in love with her. 

She drew me in, and I am enraptured in her embrace. 

I am in love with this specific thread of deliciousness I experience here — 

A kind of ancient feminine grace and beauty that exudes from the waters and the red clay. 

A mystery, a magic. 

I did not expect this, but I am letting my expectations melt. 

Melt. 

I am allowing myself to feel my enjoyment at being here, feeling at home here, even as it comes as such a delightful surprise. 

It’s not true that I don’t belong on the east coast. 

That is a lie that I no longer need to feed. 

What’s true is that this is where I want to be right now. 

This is where feels like home. 

I feel ease around home here, and that is something I am learning to receive. 

I feel like that is a part of the essence of what this place has to teach me. 

How to receive goodness. 

How to have the simple, slow, sweet life I am creating for myself. 

I am grateful. 

I am grateful I have the practice and the patience and the devotion to listening to my truth, beneath the layers of social stories. 

I am grateful for my courage to take my next step and follow a path that is mine.