On my birthday (back in August), I sat on a bench by a small beach along the San Francisco Bay. I watched the sunset over the Golden Gate Bridge. I took a picture of it.
This week, for no reason other than maybe some subliminal desire for fall hues and an appreciation for the ever changing light, I changed the wallpaper image on my phone to this picture. I also set it as the background image on my LinkedIn page. Perhaps what I’m really trying to tell myself, and the world, is that this image, this place, feels like it’s mine. It’s part of my daily background and how I currently define myself. It influences how I see the world.
In this, I’m thinking about contrast. I’m thinking about arrivals and departures. For a significant part of my life, State College, Pennsylvania was part of how I defined myself. It still is, but considerably less so. I was born there. I went to college there. I’ve gone to Penn State football games ever since I could walk. I lived there for three years between 2020 and 2023. The photo at the top of this blog is from the back yard of the house in State College. It’s a quiet place. It’s a place where I learned to slow down. It’s a place where twice (once in college and again in the three years that I lived there) I discovered and practiced writing. Ultimately, it was a place I had to leave.
This past Wednesday, I worked remotely from a church in the Haight Ashbury neighborhood (I also do work with a food program based in the church). At the end of the day, I met up with a friend for drinks and then walked home. When I walk to or from that part of town, I usually take Fillmore Street. Aside from being a major commercial corridor with restaurants, shops, and bars, and aside from being known as the “Harlem of the West” (it used to be home to lots of jazz clubs), Fillmore is also one of those famed San Francisco streets on a steep hill. Walking up Fillmore away from my apartment, I’m literally breathless (and usually a little sweaty). Walking home and catching the view of the Bay and the Bridge from where the hill crests at Broadway and Fillmore, always leaves me figuratively breathless. Wednesday night, the sky was clear and all the lights below the hill and across the Bay twinkled like diamonds in the night.
This, then, is the arrival. The slight wiggle of settling in. The beauty and color I see everyday. The communities I’m discovering and learning. The places of relative quiet I’ve found in the midst of a bustling city. The flow and thrum of being alive amidst all of these other living beings. My sense and definition of home has shifted several times over the past ten years. It will probably shift some more over the next ten. But for now, maybe because I was ready for it or it was ready for me, I feel a sense of gratitude for where I am and this place in the world.