This is my safe place. One where I am detached but present. In those suspended moments between miles and behind noises is my querencia.
A long, never-ending tunnel stretched across a decade. It was dark and I struggled. I lived but was not present.
Searching for warmth of beings, unsettling in places to call home, becoming versions after versions of myself. It’s been a perpetual effort to find my solid ground—my safe place.
And it was in the loneliest moments that I learned to be the fullest. I found my cabin. Isolated, yet warm. Far from reach, but wide and welcoming.
The cabin stood firm. Wrapped in sturdy timber, weathered by the years.
I faced myself. At my querencia.
*A querencia is a place the bull naturally wants to go to in the ring, a preferred locality… It is a place which develops in the course of the fight where the bull makes his home. It does not usually show at once, but develops in his brain as the fight goes on. In this place he feels that he has his back against the wall and in his querencia he is inestimably more dangerous and almost impossible to kill.
—Ernest Hemingway, Death in the Afternoon
