Roots

I want a simple life

I believed I was destined to live in a big city

Glamorous lifestyle, lights always on, someone awake somewhere

A city never sleeping, always working towards some greater dream for collective humanity

This was only a dream

The only people up late working are the underpaid, the unseen, overworked

So most of us

They are the ones that keep the lights on in a 22nd story window in the city

While the musical laughter of friends who never felt they could be their truest selves around one another floats up in the night sky

An offering to the stars that can no longer be seen

I found out that the life I wanted was a drain

on my energy, my soul, my essence

Being away from my home turned from my greatest dream into my worst nightmare

The flow of life, in its own sweet honey time, led me back to the grass is greener on both sides, sunshine covered lands where I was raised

I was brought into being here before I ever breathed

Dreamed into life by my ancestors in rural Georgia, scraping by

My great-grandmother, who raised seven kids and then some

As she brought my grandfather into this world in a snowstorm in what would be my family’s first home in North Carolina

She planted another seed for me

I want a simple life with languid wraparound porch mornings

My family will be there

A small library, this is my only ask of life is that I read until I die

I know I will never finish all of the books but I was born to die trying

Laughter, creativity, a job that gives me what I need, and love, always, love, only love

This is how I was meant to flow through life

The last sighs of my dying beloveds carrying the seeds I plant into the ground for future generations

I only had to see what lay beyond

Learn a lot from the world beyond my world

To understand I am rooted here

I will always flow back home as surely as water runs back to its source

My rivers will continue to flow into the ocean of love created here

home, forever

It is written in the stars