Kith-ship
There are moments in life when a place wraps itself around you, like an heirloom sweater that has always fit, even before you knew it existed. It’s not just home—it’s more than that. It’s kith—a kindred kind of belonging that doesn’t ask for explanation.
I’ve been thinking all day about how to describe this place, this feeling. If you were here, I’d tell you how it feels like the older sister of home, like home grown wiser and wilder. It feels like every corner of this massive, beautiful house, this valley, this country has been waiting for me. Last night, when I couldn’t sleep (jet lag, of course), it was as if the very walls curled around me and whispered, “Hush, I’ve got you.”
I can’t explain it any better than this:
this place feels like the love story I’ve been writing for myself all along, tucked into the pages of every story I’ve ever told. All the sentient houses in my books exist in the walls of this house too. Somehow, it’s woven with everything I’ve built and known back home, as if the threads of my life were always meant to lead here. It’s so overwhelming, I keep crying—the kind of crying that comes from being understood by something bigger than yourself.
The word “home” doesn’t quite hold the weight of this feeling. It’s a word stretched too thin in some ways and overburdened in others. But kith, with its sense of kinship and place, feels closer. This isn’t homecoming—it’s kith-coming. It’s the moment you realize that belonging doesn’t have to be earned or found.
I realize this sounds far-fetched, and even overly romantic. But it’s true. If not for the life I’ve built elsewhere, I think I’d stay.
. . .
My primary goal for today was to create an absence of blank pages. (Blank pages are tremendously overwhelming as a writer, and even if I just throw a handful of bad sentences against a page, it gives me a starting point) That, combined with a strong dose of imposter syndrome left me feeling inadequate in ways I don’t love.
It’s no small thing to be in this space, on this adventure, in the company of many talented and accomplished (and considerably younger) artists, writers, musicians, and creatives. I’m not downplaying my own contributions here, this isn’t a validation bid. I’m simply acknowledging that being a human with a brain and a deep-rooted desire to create beautiful things is more often challenging than not. And even in faraway, inspiring places, this remains true.
I have been wary of that voice that keeps whispering, “Now, don’t waste this time! Make use of every minute!” As if only “productive” minutes are valuable and worth counting. I am trying to shut that voice down, and as a tiny physical act, I abandoned a desk, and instead moved the large wingback chair in my bedroom in front of the window this morning, propped my computer on my lap, and sat with a blank screen for quite some time, staring out at the morning landscape and focusing on the feelings that kept rising to the surface.
There were many.
There is a moment in Frances Hodgson Burnett’s The Secret Garden when Mary turns her found key in a found lock, in a found door, and passes through, and then into something she didn’t realize she was looking for. A whole world opens to her and the story begins (truly begins) with that passage in the story.
"She put her hand in her pocket, drew out the key, and found the keyhole. She put the key in and turned it. It took two hands to do it, but it did turn. And then she took a long breath and looked behind her up the long walk to see if anyone was coming. No one was coming, so she turned the handle and pushed the door open and slipped through it, and shut it behind her, and stood with her back against it, looking about her and breathing quite fast with excitement and wonder and delight."
And this is how this morning felt, for me. I turned a key, with both hands, (and it has taken some doing) . . . but along the way, I am discovering something wonderful. I’m not entirely sure what I’m going to do with it yet, but my page is no longer blank. And that’s a marvelous place to begin.
KITHSHIP
Orion hangs at an angle, belt-buckled low over
the eastern horizon, which rises into breath-catching hills, before
sliding into the small valley. Here, kithship cups oaks, maples, hemlocks, and
my own small soul, held in the dark.
Gloaming season, this. Myth tugging on the hand of reason like
a child, only wilder, more urgent, and
you can feel it, if you shed your shoes, and risk losing things
you once thought were sacred. Because,
it’s all sacred—
The bells in the church belfry, and these hills, and the heron
rising out of the mist, all crone-angled and wizened, disguised as
she is in feathers and crane-shaped memories.
My blood is singing here, something tugging at the space behind
my ribs where I am most myself—seen and unseen, and I cannot decide
if it is the ache of sisterhood spaces or memory. Can you come home
to places you do not remember being?
Rhodos, Orion’s sister lingers here in the clambering winter roses
clutching the stone wall in this mist-laden morning. A pair of swans are grazing
on the lake bottom and do not mind the rain. Nor I, held
liminal in the kinship of sentient places, my own self a singular fingerprint
on the portrait of this landscape’s face.
