“There is nothing like returning to a place that remains unchanged to find the ways in which you yourself have altered.”…Nelson Mandela
We are approaching seven months since we moved back to the San Juans.
For those of you who may read this, and do not know our story, we lived in the San Juans for ten years, left for seven years and just returned this past Feb. Those intervening seven years were spent mostly on South Whidbey Island where we had a beautiful home, a few very close friends, a wide circle of aquaintances, a thriving real estate business, and were involved in our island community.
So why did we leave? Why would we surrender that life?
We left for love. We love living in the San Juans, it is a place of striking beauty, with tender moments of isolation and quiet. It is also the place of the beginning of our marriage, and it holds many of our most wonderful, and a few of our saddest memories. It is a place that touches us in a way we do not fully understand; only feel.
We visited the San Juans a number of times over the past years, and each time, it was more difficult to leave. Each time we felt a sadness upon returning home to Whidbey followed by a few leaden days before we re-entered the atmosphere of our daily life.
And yet, we find we must now go. This is our place no longer. For these San Juan Islands are our furnace, the one that melted us down those many years ago. We remember now the heat, the flame, and this time we choose to not be melted. This time we choose to remain who we are, and not be transformed. We know the moth is destroyed by the flame; while the steel is made hard. Like the moth we have been drawn to this flame – like the steel we are hardened now and resist. So this time, we do not surrender, and we cannot stay. There is no flame without heat. The beauty remains, but we cannot hold to it, it is not enough.
And so we go, as we must. We are no longer of it unless we surrender our steel, and this we shall not do. We are not glad about this, but we are not sad about it either. We just are, with it.
We have changed in an unchanging landscape.
