“When it’s over, I want to say I have been a bride married to amazement, I’ve been a bridegroom taking the world into my arms.” – Mary Oliver

Tonight, I stepped outside after my first yoga class in twenty years.  I had opened tight places I did not even know I had.  As I left the studio, I was relieved that I could still walk!

What really caught my attention though, as I stretched my limbs out the door into this far northern night: stars. A whole sky–full.

Our gorgeous north Idaho summers succumb to long winters of clouds. Our ski mountain loves the snow, but I miss that deeply expansive sight of night sky.

Maybe it was 90 minutes of intense yoga. (I’m in great shape. I looked at the class schedule and forgot my twenty years away…)
Maybe it was the two weeks that have passed since I last saw a sky full of stars. (Here in our remote county, when there are no clouds, we truly see stars. There are many more stars than people… or lights to block the night sky!)
Maybe it was too-long winter hibernation.

I don’t know what it was.

But I do know what happened as I stepped outside, seeing the Big Dipper, Orion, the Pleiades, and the other Winter constellations:
I did not feel like I was 120 +/- odd lbs, standing on a cold stab of north Idaho sidewalk.
Instead, I felt as wide as that sky.

I felt as if time stretched back to my earliest memories of stars…night sailing off Cape Cod, my family singing lullabies….

And my strongest memories… sleeping river-side, sleeping bags encrusted in silvery frost, under endless stars on the cactus-bound Mexican border …

or my favorite memories… tracing winter constellations among the green and pink swirls of northern nights, on the Canadian border, as sled dogs slept, nose under tail…

It was as if, in that moment, all those times, and all those places, existed, all at once.

If I had a label, it would be mystical.

In that moment, I felt the whole wide universe welcomed me. I felt completely Home. I felt, in every cell, as if I belonged.

I’m not complaining… and I will go back for more yoga!

What helps you know, in your bones, that you belong?