Spring is a time of change. What was once cold and quiet begins to shift into something fuller. Even in a year where the seasons didn’t quite feel right, the transition still comes. The landscape changes, and in some ways, so do we.

What follows is a short story paired with poems about leaving, returning and finding something in between.

Passage One:

There was a time when everything seemed simple. No hesitation, just doing what came naturally. Movement and the earth felt familiar and didn’t need to be understood. Thinking wasn’t as necessary and instinct was enough. Everything fit and that was that.

Over time, that started to change. Things became more complicated. What once felt automatic began to require thought. Small decisions started to carry more weight and consequences, and it became harder to trust what used to feel obvious. Doubt slowly replaced certainty. The shift wasn’t sudden, it built over time, almost unnoticed at first.

Eventually, hesitation became normal. Movement felt less natural, more deliberate. The connection that once felt effortless started to feel distant. And before it was fully realized, the places that had always felt like home no longer felt the same.

“Estranged by Wild”

I no longer feel at home in you—
like a stranger asked to leave his shoes
at the door he once walked through.

I left tracks in places only we knew,
without armor, 

without something to prove.

Now I walk heavier,
like my shoelaces have come undone.

Burdened by who I’ve become,
I am still
your son.

Are you not too old for bitterness,
too vast to hold a grudge so small?

We were once so familiar, I recall
never feeling apart, like an internal wilderness.

Now I hesitate, unsure where to place myself,

caught somewhere between who I am and someone else.

I trace the ground like I’ve forgotten how it felt,

to move without the weight of what I’ve/I’d been dealt.

Passage Two: 

There’s a common idea that distance brings clarity. People say that stepping away helps put things into perspective, that somewhere out there, things begin to make more sense. In a way, that’s true. Not because there were answers waiting, but because movement itself changed the way things were seen.

As Henry David Thoreau wrote, “I took a walk in the woods and came out taller than the trees.” Time away has a way of doing that. It doesn’t necessarily solve anything, but it shifts something internally. It creates space.

Go without a plan, and without the expectation of finding something specific. Sometimes all you know is that staying in the same place was no longer right. 

As it is written in The Gospel of Mark 6:4, “A prophet is not without honor, except in his hometown, among his relatives, and in his own household.”

“Reentry”

There is a moment-
somewhere between descent and landing
when the world returns too quickly.

Mountains flatten into memory,
distance folds in quietly,
and everything becomes within reach of me.

On the occasions I’ve been lucky enough to leave,
to disappear into something larger than me,
there is a clarity not escape,
but something truer than that, something I feel.

Something that’s been waiting for me,
perhaps it’s the life I was meant to lead.

And then

reentry.

The slow return to smaller things.
Tight rooms. Tight schedules. Long, restless nights.
A life that fits,
but no longer feels right.

The planes, the roads, the rails
they bring us closer,
but never back to where we were.

I tell myself this is home,

but something in me won’t agree.

I’ve seen too much to return as I was,

too much to unknow what I know 

in me.

As if the freedom was not the leaving

but the becoming.

Passage Three:

There wasn’t a single moment where everything made sense, no clear answer waiting at the end of it. And there probably won’t be. But something will shift. The need to figure everything out starts to matter less, and the pressure to return to what things were begins to dissipate.

Distance doesn’t fix anything, but it changes the way things are understood. It creates space. It makes it clear that not everything needs to be solved to keep moving forward. Some things aren’t meant to be resolved. Some things are meant to be carried.

At some point, simple things stand out. Don’t listen to what they say, go see. Not because that idea has all the answers, but because it doesn’t. It leaves the decision up to you, where it belongs. 

Then you might ask, how will I know if I’m on my path?

Poet David Whyte offers the following: “How do you know that you are on your path? Because it disappears. That’s how you know. How do you know that you are really doing something radical? Because you can’t see where you are going.”

The truth is, you won’t always know what you’re doing, or where it’s leading. Most of the time, you won’t. But that doesn’t make it wrong. It just means it’s yours.

“Learning the Way Back”

I have rarely found my life on “the path,”
therefore it is the last place you’ll find me.

Not in straight lines,
not in anxious steps laid out ahead,
not in directions given
by someone who has never stood where I stand.

I have found it in the mountains, where I was driven,

and in the desert, amongst the sand.

Not something handed, not something written,

just something I chose and built by hand.

There are moments the way feels uncertain and closed, 

when nothing ahead seemed steady or close. 

Still, not everything is solved by quote or law

So learn to trust what is underpaw.

But nothing was broken, nothing misled,

only a version of me that had to be shed.

Not every turn needs a reason to be,

not every step needs to be justified by me.

So I stopped searching for where it would lead,

and started becoming what I might need.

No perfect line, no final decree,

just step after step 

becoming me.

If anything is carried forward from this, let it be this: in the end, there may not be a clear way back — only a way forward.

“The universe gave you a compass not in your pocket, but in your chest. Your intuition is the echo of the cosmos whispering through you — and yet we so often trust our fear more than that quiet knowing.”

— Alan Watts