An airport is a vacuum, a place of an unwelcome sort of timelessness where one can introvert and come to three hours later like someone who has been knocked unconscious.
I’ve been knocked unconscious.
Lately it has been impossible to get the sort of time alone I need. I wonder from time to time this year just how much time alone I’d need to feel repaired and rested, restored to a place where an abundance flowed out again (if it ever did). My feet planted in the earth up to mid-calf, I might stay from one winter solstice to the next before it was enough. It has taken this long for me to reach full height and breadth; now all that’s left is to go deep.
I feel the cold dirt between my toes and it’s very good.
When I go out of town every month to my Jungian studies program, I feel giddy with joy by the time I’m ready to leave. Every moment I spend by myself is a resurrection, even when spent in the airport, in the limousine, in the hotel room with its muted lighting and mocha-colored walls. Every single bit is like life was when time stood still.
Building villages of pebbles, stones, and sticks behind the hydrangea bushes.
Lying full length along a branch of my favorite tree, mesmerized by the swirls and eddies of the creek below, glinting green, brown.
In bed with my husband, newlyweds, my arm thrown across his chest on a Saturday morning, the smell of the magnolias coming through the screens.
Nursing my first child in the middle of the night, her lashes dark and lush against skin made silvery by the moonlight.
As if it would never end.
That I can feel such a magical sense of time in these places full of travelers, weariness, dirt, conglomerations, noise, hustle, churning, banging, squeaks, dongs, crackling speakers, wheels that go whop-whop-whep-whop, crying children, a cacophony of languages shows just how long it has been since I have been able to sit at my own hearth and stir the ashes.
The Third Eve 
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