When I’m in flow, I follow the threads that life spins out for me. Something meaningful finds me: a book, a teacher, an object, a word. And I follow that thread as it spirals out and leads me to new discoveries that feel meant-to-be. There’s a great web of connective tissue that I love to explore.
Today I followed a thread that led me to an important connection, one I’ve been seeking my whole life.
I was born in Limestone Maine, in the very far Northeast. My father was in the Air Force and tells the story about how he could request an area to be stationed and decided to put Northeast US on the form. He pictured a guy laughing as he matched my father to Loring Air Force Base in Aroostook County, just about a far as you can go in either north or east and still be on American soil. He and his high school sweetheart married and moved there from Minnesota, crossing Canada, to that land where they didn’t know a soul.
Eventually, in 1968, they brought a baby girl into the world and just a few months later, after my father had served his term with tours to the Philippines and Vietnam, relocated to Denver. My father had been in Colorado Springs for training early in his military time and fell in love, determined to move here as soon as he could, enamored of the mountains and the dry air.
I grew up here in the lands of the Arapaho, Cheyenne and Ute peoples, called Colorado, and have always felt deeply connected to the land, the mountains, the people. I don’t remember any other birthright and have never had a reason or opportunity to travel back to Maine where I was born. It feels like a far-off fantasy place, one I know nothing about. People ask where I was born and when I tell them, some begin waxing poetic about that state, the rocks and water, and all I can do is stare blankly and say, of that, I have no memory.
In my heart, I am Native to Colorado. Though one time I said so in a newspaper profile (it being easier than explaining I was born somewhere I don’t remember and this has always been home) and my mother called me out for lying to the paper. Fake news, I suppose. I wasn’t born here, but my soul is firmly tethered.
Each time I’ve left this place to settle elsewhere, it only lasts about a year. I come back as quickly as I can. Once with my family to Northern California, once for acting school in Indiana, and finally to graduate school in Michigan, where I was cold and stalked. Never feeling quite at ease, certainly not at home, until I was back with the mountains to my West and the plains to my East. I have stopped leaving. I may travel but always come home. I am deeply rooted, connected here.
It’s a bit ironic that my children were born in China and I’ve taken them both to their birthplaces on the shores of that distant country, halfway around the world. My husband and brother were born in Denver and we often drive past those hospital sites in our daily life. But I’ve not had a birthplace reunion myself.
Which brings me to the thread, the weaving. The mythical place of Maine that I left so young and never went back. I’ve felt so very disconnected from that place until something clicked this morning. A deep knowing and a sense I would venture there in the not-too-distant future. A calling.
I was in ritual for the Season of Salted Bones with my Hag Ways Coven, and our wild witch leader Danielle recited a poem called Footsteps of Angels by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow. The words sailed forth and called to me. I looked up the poem through that magical scrying tool (as Danielle so named it) known as Google. It brought me to the Maine Historical Society website. A thread dangled before me as I read the poem.
“With a slow and noiseless footstep
Comes that messenger divine,
Takes the vacant chair beside me,
Lays her gentle hand in mine.
And she sits and gazes at me
With those deep and tender eyes,
Like the stars, so still and saint-like,
Looking downward from the skies.”
I tugged the thread and found myself in a spider’s web of verse, hauntingly familiar. Then came Midnight Mass for a Dying Year, so like the dreary year we’re finally left behind.
“Then, too, the Old Year dieth,
And the forests utter a moan,
Like the voice of one who crieth
In the wilderness alone,
“Vex not his ghost!”
And finally, this brightening voice in Flowers:
“Bright and glorious is that revelation,
Written all over this great world of ours;
Making evident our own creation,
In these stars of earth, these golden flowers.”
Stars of earth. Golden Flowers. Connecting back to the morning’s ritual where I envisioned a sunflower seed, planting it firmly in the new year. It grew into a golden flower that showered me first with sunshine, then in gentle water, and finally drying me with a soft wind.
I knew then, without a doubt, I had a connection to my birthplace through the words of this old and famous poet also born there. A child of the same soil. Someone who wrote words that still danced and reverberated all these years later. Someone I needed to read further and understand.
I browsed a bit more at the trove of his work and found a volume devoted to abolition called Poems to Slavery and poetry devoted to indigenous people, bringing the connection back around to my current work for justice in the world. Ringing in my head. Connecting me to a land where I was born and now must visit.
I moved full circle this morning with ritual and poetry, and now I must go plant flower seeds for the spring.
~ 🌘
Share your own threads of connection in the comments or write to Jeannene at moonfood@jaderabbit.net.
