Her poem for me, the one she wrote for me who wrote of living anxious agoraphobia, her poem lines 
When I stand in line at customs in Canada, turn and wave tear brave to my Mama still standing at security, smiling me off.
And again, when in Dallas, when the flight up to Arkansas gets cancelled at ten o’clock at night after four hours of waiting and I swallow hard, the farm hick in a foreign country without a phone, and I stammer out a request to borrow a phone, let a stranger know that she need not come fetch me in the middle of the night as no flight’s leaving this Texas town and I pray real and go looking for a pillow.
And her poem asking why we do not leave home, it whispers hard after I finally arrive at the retreat center to speak and get word that fumbling, stumbling me has left her passport, the necessary golden key to get back home, back on the plane and I nod that her poem words are right, and that this could be why anxious clutzes like me never leave home and I laugh feeble.
And when people drive a long way to meet, and we shake hands, and I look in their eyes, and I wince awkward because they can be only disappointed because I am the plain common broken, and when I retrieve the passport to fly back to nest proper, gratefully hug wise woman, and the storm clouds keep me from the connect out of Dallas, I sit in my seat on the tarmac and my mind traces the lines of her poem….
And when I call Farmer collect to say it won’t be us spooned together tonight under stars and the cotton sheets and the chin trembles and we pray together over telephones lines across a continent and I sleep another night in Dallas … I think of that poem.
And what it means to leave home and fears that hound hard and how to say yes inspite of the angst and tripping along and laughing anyways, giving thanks for those who take me anyways, foiled expectations. And I answer her hauntingly beautiful poem with my life.
from InsideOut: poems
Stayed ~ for AnnWhy do we not
leave home.
Is it really for fear
of what lies
beyond, or rather
for fear that the
roof will abscond
with the doors
and the shutters
we’ve always known.
And who would they
blame if it happened
just so, if the whole
curtained place simply
picked up its stakes,
disappeared on the wind
in our absence. What
are we really afraid
of, why do we not
leave home. ~ from InsideOut: poems
And this trip answers why I do not leave home: why the roof of home will never abscond, why there there’s no fear that any curtained place will pick up stakes when we walk out the front door, why there’s no fear of whatever is beyond.
Why I am no longer afraid.
Because the whole long way,these are the words on the lips, murmured aloud, again, again:
Lord, thou hast been our dwelling place in all generations. ~Ps. 90:2
It’s true, this is now whyI never leave home.
Wherever I am….
I stay at Home in Him.
This morning in Dallas — again — I take a deep breath, smile sure, grab my passport and ticket.
And I fly.
Photos: the trip where I never left Home
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