Endlessly new

Quote from Ursula LeGuin's story "Solitude," published in the collection "The Birthday of the World."

"Life in the [village] ... is repetitive, as I said; and so it can be dull. Nothing new happens. The mind always wants new happenings. So for the young soul there is wandering and scouting, travel, danger, change. But of course travel and danger and change have their own dullness. It is finally always the same otherness over again; another hill, another river, another man, another day. The feet begin to turn in a long, long circle. The body begins to think of what it learned back home, when it learned to be still. To be aware. To be aware of the grain of dust beneath the sole of the foot, and the skin of the sole of the foot, and the touch and scent of the air on the cheek, and the fall and motion of the light across the air, and the color of the grass on the high hill across the river, and the thoughts of the body, of the soul, the shimmer and ripple of colors and sounds in the clear darkness of the depths, endlessly moving, endlessly changing, endlessly new.

"And so I came back home."

**

Reading this, I thought of the years I spent travelling around Eastern Europe and how I knew when they were over: when I met the man who is now my husband, I knew that I had had enough of movement. I wanted to live in one place awhile. I wanted to understand how that one place could be "endlessly changing, endlessly new."

And here I am.

Happy 39th birthday to me.