On finding that the harder task is not discovering our voice, but learning to trust what it already knows.
How do you want to live?
There were many early mornings when I sat out on the lanai of our Florida home, with KAZ tucked in beside me.
During the cooler months, I would light the fire pit and settle into the sofa while the darkness slowly gave way to morning. Those quiet hours became a ritual. A time to contemplate.
Or so I believed.
I told myself I was thinking about world events, or our future, or how much I loved the home we had built and how hard it would be to leave it.
But looking back, I think I was really listening.
At the time, I didn’t know what I was listening for. I only knew that something kept returning. Not all at once. Not dramatically. Quietly. Again and again.
There was a growing sense of narrowing, though I didn’t yet have a name for it. A feeling that the life ahead of me was asking different questions than the life behind me.
For a long time, I argued with what I was noticing. There were countless reasons to stay. We had built a beautiful home. We had dear friends. Robert loved the life we had created there. Yet something inside me kept paying attention to what nourished me and what no longer did.
What I understand now is that I wasn’t trying to decide whether to leave Florida. I was learning to trust my own way of seeing.
That may sound like a small distinction, but it wasn’t.
The more I trusted my own way of seeing, the harder it became to speak in a voice that wasn’t my own.
Nothing changed overnight. The fire pit still glowed in the darkness. KAZ was still beside me. The house was still the house we had created. Yet once I began trusting what I was seeing, it became increasingly difficult to imagine spending the rest of my life ignoring it.
Eventually, that realization carried consequences. Robert and I left Florida and moved to Santa Fe.
There was searching, uncertainty, and questions about where we belonged. At one point, we even considered leaving the country altogether.
Yet the question remained the same:
How do you want to live?
Perhaps we spend the first half of life trying to become someone and the second half recognizing who we’ve been all along.
Recently, while working on a new website, I realized those mornings on the lanai had been preparing me.
When I first created a website years ago, I thought of it primarily as a marketing tool. A place to display paintings and hopefully attract collectors.
This time feels different.
The more I reflected on what I wanted this new site to be, the more I realized that what mattered most was not how effectively it marketed my work.
What mattered was whether it felt true to who I am.
Whether it reflected not only the paintings, but the life from which the paintings emerge. The questions. The observations.
The ongoing conversation between paying attention and making sense of what I find.
Perhaps becoming ourselves is less about invention than recognition. Perhaps we pay attention long enough, trust what we see long enough, and discover that a voice has been there all along.
Not waiting to be created.
Waiting to be trusted.
Most of us carry a question we already know the answer to.
The answer often arrives long before we’re ready to trust it.
And perhaps that is what those mornings on the lanai were teaching me all along.
At the edge of light,
Melanie