So much has been written about home: landscape of memory, guardian of the lost. We are actuaries of our homes (I mean our first homes, our childhood haunts) calculating risks v. benefits of returns. Shall I move back there? Will it be the same? Will it be different? My mind runs over the landscape of this home as though tracing a path, a sort of traveling through. I collect specimens: the smell of pine, the heat of the sauna, the wet cold of a snow covered lake, the crunch of snow under my boot on a cold night, Orion’s belt in the sky.

We are close, my family and I. How this came to be remains a mystery. But perhaps it is the fact of five sisters and one (youngest) brother. Or something to do with tribe mentality, wanting to be a part of and fear of abandonment. There are, of course, variations on this closeness depending on the moment in time.

Home has always remained a function of my imagination, my creative mind, my ability to manifest thought, feeling, action in whatever way, unconsciously and then not. Right now, I think most of running when I think of my childhood home. I imagine a long line that unfolds before me, my legs growing strong, my mind clear. I see my brother, fourteen years my junior, running in front of me through the August heat, sprinting hard against the quandary of the body. I hear my breath, feel the beating organ pulse, push on, push on.

Back in Vermont after three long weeks home with my two boys, I am finally alone. Silence folds in on me, a stillness everywhere punctuated by the solitary flight of a bird above the mountain.

I’m trying to get back to my writing mind, trying to dig down deep beyond the layers of fear, the raw anxiety of financial issues, the unknown.

We keep our lives in squares these days. I could show you mine: a lovely log cabin, a snowy wooded mountain view, a sun splashed table. But these images have become a commodity now and we are selling each other (and ourselves) our lives. What is wrong with that, you ask? It is not about ugliness but about the illusion of who we are. The covering over of fear and the inner life of the mind with stuff. The richness of our lives is always, as some say, an inside job, which means no amount of square, glossy beauty can make us happy.

And so, I have decided, this is the year of my becoming all the ways I need most: holding fear like a baby to my breast, giving her the comfort of words, the comfort of believing. I am at my best when things fall apart, as underdog and chaser of wild things. This is the year of justice. We are moving towards apocalyptic power, we are AOC & RBG, we are becoming. Long before Michelle Obama’s book, Becoming (amazing and def. worth a read!), back in my Julia Kristeva days, I fell in love with the word becoming–with the line of poetry I wrote in a cold Minneapolis cafe, watching the snow fall into the river and feeling my life scatter there at the surface: I am always becoming.

This is also the year of honest finances. I have to stop avoiding money and take a hard look at how I make it and how I spend it (ouch!).

And though we know a lot about a lot–intellectually– becoming is the practice of the moment and of making a different thought from the old, well-loved thought we have rubbed clean for years. It is making a different choice in the moment whenever you can. Our thoughts become our feelings which become the actions that shape our lives.

My car is dead in the driveway, my job is probably ending, I owe a lot of money in a lot of places — never-the-less, I am becoming.