Feeling Rooted

Six weeks. Driving across the United States and back. One black lab named Isla, one partner, Jan, and more hotel pillows than I care to count.

It has been a beautiful trip — full of people I love, landscapes that took my breath away, and memories I'll carry for the rest of my life. And somewhere in the middle of all of it, I discovered something I wasn't expecting to find on the road: myself.

Not the version of me that craves adventure and surprise vistas and wants to explore every nook and cranny of this country — though she was very much along for the ride. I mean the quieter self. The one who is yearning for my own bed. My art space. Our saltwater pool. My kitchen. The smell of home.

These aren't small things. They are, I'm realizing, everything.

I notice I've grown spacey as the weeks have passed. A pleasant brain fog — not sure what day it is, what time zone I'm in, barely tracking what's happening in the wider world. (Honestly? That last part has been a gift.) But there's a difference between beautiful disconnection and the kind that leaves you unmoored. I am ready to feel the ground beneath me again.

There was a moment on this trip that stopped me cold.

We visited my grown daughters — two women who have built entire lives. Their own patterns. Their own systems. Their own ways of doing things. Beautiful, full, rooted lives.

And I felt it — that particular ache of a mother who realizes she is no longer needed. It's a strange grief, one nobody really warns you about.

My daughter Lily saw it on my face. And she said something I will never forget:

"Yes, Ma. We don't need you anymore. We want you instead."

I have been turning those words over in my head ever since. 

Need keeps you tethered. Want sets you free — and then chooses you anyway. What a profound reframe. What a gift from my child to me.

I am suddenly in my late sixties. I say suddenly because that's genuinely what it feels like — a surprise, a plot twist, a season I didn't see coming.

And what I know now, in a way I simply didn't before, is that rootedness is not a limitation. It is not the consolation prize for those who've stopped adventuring. It is its own kind of power.

My books. My art. My journal. Nature. My kitchen. The predictability of the mail delivery at 9:00 a.m.

These anchors — which once would have felt almost embarrassingly ordinary to me — are now the things I reach for when the world feels too loud, too uncertain, too far outside my control. And so much of it is. Outside my control, I mean. The older I get, the more clearly I see that the only real ground I have is the one I build inside my own heart and soul, inside my own routines, inside my own life.

While we were traveling, an email arrived.

A former student — someone I hadn't heard from in 35 years — wrote to tell me how much I had mattered to their life.

My partner Jan watched me read it and said, "You get these often. Maybe it's time you measure the success of your work not by how much money you did or didn't make — but by the lives you impacted.”

I resisted her words. But as we sped past the industrial ports of Gary, Indiana at dusk, I realized she was on to something.

When I think about it that way, I feel rich. Genuinely, deeply rich. Not in the way I once thought I wanted to be, but in the way that actually lasts — knowing that my words, my time, my presence, my connections have mattered. That they ripple forward in ways I'll never fully see or know.

Here is what I am bringing home from this trip, tucked in alongside the dirty laundry and the dog-eared maps:

Feeling rooted is not necessarily a retreat from living. It is the source of it.

Being wanted is more beautiful than being needed.

And the life I have built — the quiet, creative, grounded, deeply connected life — is not the lesser version of the one I dreamed of.

It is the one that was worth dreaming.