A NEW SPACE AND STAGE

Rev. Kate Winters, Ph.D., Dwelling in Presence, October 18, 2023

It’s been nearly a month since my last post. Joel and I just returned from driving out to Wisconsin to see family and friends and to celebrate our wedding anniversary. It was a good trip, lovely autumn colors both ways. The hours of driving helped us debrief from the hectic schedule we kept while there. As you may have surmised from this blog, Joel is as extraverted as I am introverted. The more visits the merrier! Luckily I love these people and so I survived even though I am a bit worn out.

How good it is to be home! This morning I broke in the new window seat that Joel built for me in the weeks before we left. I did not know he had these skills, and it is beautiful. My view out the window includes the cave shaped opening into the woods that speaks to me of secrets to be discovered! Mysteries to be revealed. Something tells me that my soul is going to be deepened in this place as I am surrounded by the love that built this little retreat space for me and the wonders of the earth outside. I sit here feeling blessed.

I can tell that I am in a new stage in life. The drive out was different than it ever was before. My dear friend Julie suggested that it was because I wasn’t preoccupied with work or the church. My mind was free and open to different thoughts and moods. The stops and scenery felt a bit like a life review.

Our first stop was at my niece Samantha’s and then my sister Sue’s in Delmar, New York. Sam was having an amazing Oktoberfest party. The time there was a bit like having a view of the road-not-taken with her daughters and other grandnieces there. The next day we attended one of my grandniece’s softball games. I could see the beauty of my siblings’ lives with children and grandchildren, highs and lows, lots of sports, overflowing with energy and love. I don’t expect their lives are easy, but it is clear that it is very rich. It felt good to be included with them. Not having had children, first by choice, then by chance, this will always be a defining aspect of my life. Just as I write this, my sister Susan sent a message about her school district being on lockdown because of a bomb threat. Amazing. Parenting these days is an act of courage as well as the most generous love. I pray that my love gets used up in other ways in this world.

After leaving Delmar, we drove through the Mohawk Valley in upstate New York. I had for the first time a visceral sense of being at home, as if I belonged there. I can’t explain it. I spent my first twelve years in New York city, only a small part of it upstate with my father’s parents and his brother’s family. We spent a week or two in the Adirondacks most summers. There was also my mother’s parents’ country place in which we spent the rest of my childhood summers in Putnam Valley. Those were idyllic times for a girl from Brooklyn. But I never had the landscape speak to me like this before, directly to my body. It felt a bit like falling in love. I wonder if it was the flowing waters of the Mohawk River calling to me, or if the rolling hills were bringing me into a more intense relationship with the earth.

Yes. I think this window seat is going to be a fertile plae for exploring life’s mysteries and surprises. More later…