bloom where you're planted.

Worked hard at the newspaper all day, then came home and wandered down to the river to swim. On the way back, picked berries in the straggly sumac woods, collected eggs and closed the chickens up for the night, and harvested bunches of salad greens, snap peas and radishes. Then ate a big salad for dinner and sat in the hammock swing on the front porch trying to play banjo.

There are times when the grass always seems a few shades greener somewhere else. As much as I loved working in the wilderness and enjoyed the transient, vegabonding life that accompanied it, my journal entries from those times consistently express a longing for constancy, to have the time to read and write, to have a garden and room for creativity; to learn about beekeeping and wood working and putting food by. To sleep in a bed and have a kitchen.

Now I have all those things, and I spend hours in front of my computer or behind the wheel of my car longing again for the wild, open places; the simplicity of carrying everything you own and need in a single load; the camaraderie and adventure and sheer exhilaration of being alive. I plot how I can leave this behind and be there again.

But then, too, there are times like this evening when I'm completely content where I am.

*Bloom where you're planted* KB said to me yesterday as we finished our beers, sitting above a waterfall at a perfect wooded swimming hole. It was dusk, and the air was hazy, the light slanting just right. I'd never heard that phrase before.