Having left Spirit Hill after living there for two years, I understand even more acutely why so many guests return to stay. There is this world, and then there is Spirit Hill Farm.
The other night there was an almost-full moon, and I stood outside and looked at it and tried to connect to the many, many full moons I admired while out checking that the chickens were tucked into their coop at night or while I was out walking the property for the sheer joy of seeing things illuminated by both the lights hanging from the trees and the moonlight.
I loved my grandma’s chocolate chip cookies. That’s a thing, right? Loving your grandma’s food, or the food of someone beloved, food they cooked for you, food that made you feel home, safe, loved, full. Then there is the experience of trying to recreate the same food in your own kitchen, and the realization that you can’t. Even if you went to the trouble to get the same brand of butter, of flour. The cookies just aren’t as good.
That’s how it was with the moon. It’s still beautiful here in Boston. I still love it, and yet I have a gentle hunger for the Spirit Hill moon. It’s a little more…wild…a little more…moon. That’s not to say that the Spirit Hill moon has ruined all moons for me just as my grandma’s cookies have not ruined all cookies for me. It’s to say that I now carry yet another example of knowing in my body that beauty exists in the world that feeds my soul, that makes me extra thankful for this one life I have.
The moon is always there at Spirit Hill, just as my grandma’s cookies are always there for me, for even though she doesn’t make her cookies anymore, somewhere, in some bend of time, she does because I remember. What I am saying is that my experience of being alive has been sweetened because once upon a time I walked from the guest house to the chicken coop at Spirit Hill Farm and said good night to a moon that hung above the giant cedar trees that have shaded that special place for years and years and years.
We leave our homes and go out and see new places visit to learn, to unwind, to see, to experience, to live. Sometimes we return, just because we can. Just because our hungers ask us to go back and taste the sweetness one more time.