It has been 3 years since I posted. So, I think that makes me an official failed blogger. But I am back, and they say how you finish is more important than how you start.

I have many excuses for why I stopped blogging, I will spare you the details but I can summarize by saying that it has been a wild ride. It has included the highs and lows of growing a company to 10x its original size, adoption, weight gain & many recommitments to weight loss, running marathons untrained, great highs brought low with a season of depression I didn’t realize I was experiencing, and lots and lots of resolutions to get better, to be the best me, but I discovered my definition of “best” had nothing to do with the real me. The culmination of all these things has been being tired, a lot. Which is, I have found, the story of everyone I know. So I am sure you can relate.

My last post in 2016 was about going home, and I find myself after the journey from 2016 to 2019 continuing to explore that concept. What is “home”? Will I ever find mine? Is the sense of longing I feel unique to me as an Army brat constantly ready for the next move, or is it my soul searching for something greater? That longing for something that won’t be found here, despite my many attempts to force it.

If we find ourselves with a desire that nothing in this world can satisfy, the most probable explanation is that we were made for another world.

– C.S. Lewis

I wish I could divide my soul and plant a piece of it in all my favorite places. My many, momentary homes. It would be my version of a benign **horcrux.

One piece would be planted in the yard of a painted brick house in Chevy Chase, the neighborhood I would walk the mornings of my Lexington college years. I would grow that soul seedling in the soil shared by the old moss-covered tree trunks that line the cracked pavement.

Another would be deposited beside a royal palm by the pool at the Coquina. I would swim with my memories of my grandfather tossing me into the air to plunge into turquoise waters surrounded by the sound of Sarasota waves a few sandy yards away.

A third would be tucked beneath a fern in my mother’s garden by the fountain in our house on West Old Coach. I would expand into the beauty of her living art. My limbs would stretch upstairs to peek into periwinkle framed skylights of my bedroom where shafts of moonlight melted onto my sleeping childhood self.

What a gift to be able to fully go back. When I need to experience what those places provided for me again I could simply follow the roots of my soul to that home. I could open my eyes and be there, fully. That is what the appreciation of nostalgia would allow. But the truth is I hate nostalgia.

I hate it because it is a complicated emotion. Not easily controlled. My desire heretofore has been to cut away anything emotionally complicated. The problem is that I am that very thing being pruned, so the by-product has been a sadistic mutilation of my soul. I have cut it up, but not to plant in beautiful places. Instead to bury it in the hope that decay would render me less prone to the pain of being sensitive. But what gets pruned comes back thicker, and so my job of cutting away my heart has only made me tired.

To experience nostalgia, the home-hunting longing, and then try to understand it is like trying to get a clear look at the twinkle of a lightening bug by assuming that a grasp of its anatomy is necessary to enjoy its light. It is not meant to be seen up close. The magic is in the softness of the distance from fact. I have too often dissected the moment, the feeling, to its death. I would not allow myself to feel if I could not understand. And in the process of pursuing understanding I killed the beauty. I killed a part of my self.

There is a line of trees along I-65 that I have driven past for 20 years. When they were first planted I was a child and I remember thinking they looked like they had been plucked from Candy Land. They were perfectly round and charming – living lolly pops. Over the years they have gone through seasons where their outlines transformed from controlled to unkempt. Other drives I found them cut down to nothing but bare frames, leaving no trace of their sapling selves. On this drive back to Nashville I found they had grown up. Full, healthy, and without the extremes of youth. The controlled symmetry of their younger days was there, but maturity allowed more flexibility in their limbs.

I hope that as I process through all that has happened over the last 3 years in this blog I discover I have become a bit more like those trees as I found them now. I look forward to sharing my story of meeting myself-as I am, not as I wished to be-with you in the hope that you too may look upon yourself with grace as you wrestle through those hard heart longings.

**NOTE: Full disclosure, this nerdy, semi-dark analogy came naturally to me as after 7 attempts taking the Pottermore house selection test I ALWAYS land in Slytherin. Every. Single. Time. I finally ran out of email accounts to use to re-take it.**