The Unselected Journals of Emma M. Lion: Vol. 8

by Beth Brower

These long days out of doors feel like coming home to a place to which I’ve always held the key, but was told it should be put away. But, oh! There has been sovereignty of self in this place—of body, of spirit, of the intangible magic which sews the two together. To shout and run. To lie in tall grasses and watch the wind play the sunlight both true and false. To feel the building threat of rain and watch it crash to earth from the tenuous safety beneath a tree rather than from behind a window. I am, I suppose, satiating a long drought. My childhood soul has been left too long abandoned. How do I best find it in London? At times I feel my body has betrayed the girl I was, growing past the lithe limbs hewn in independence. We are to be fit for the purposes of adulthood, I know this. Childhood anticipations are traded with the shouldering of heavier things. But these days, these stones-tossed-in-tall-grass days, have stretched my muscles, recalled past forms, and I am remembering how it is to feel, to follow the instincts of something young yet ancient. To step outside the province of maturity and marvel.

One should go away long enough to know the cotton-soft contentment of coming home.