Again I find myself returning to the theme of home, how a place can call you back long after you’ve left it, and how returning isn’t always going backward. Sometimes it’s a forward movement from another direction, a circling flight that finally brings you to where you were always meant to land.
Eureka Springs Arkansas was never my childhood home, that honor belongs to Springfield, Missouri, but I spent enough time in Eureka that the place settled into my bones. It’s a funky, alpine hamlet where artists, queers, mystics, hill-folk, and fundamentalists somehow coexist in a strange, holy tension. For reasons I felt again today, it is the only place where I have ever consistently felt like I belonged.
I spent much of the day wandering its hills, and that old feeling of homecoming rose up in me as naturally as breath.
I began the morning making my rounds, selling hummingbird suncatchers to a few wholesale accounts. It was a beautiful day with the promise of blistering heat. My first stops were up on Bear Mountain, the mountain I once lived on when I fled the netherworld of Branson for something truer, freer, and far more alive.
The day had already shifted off-kilter. I was supposed to meet someone for lunch, but they canceled. I tried to bring another friend along for the ride, but that didn’t work out either. So there I was flying solo, footloose and fancy free. Good enough.
I stopped for brunch at a little restaurant much loved by a friend who has since moved off to the Pacific Northwest. Familiarity brought a kind of comfort, but the food had changed, and not for the better. There was plenty of it, but not the quality I remembered. Still, it was sufficient, and as my grandmother on my father’s side might have said, “my sufficiency was fully surrensified.”
Selling my work, and in essence myself, has always been my least favorite task. I was never meant for the world’s oldest profession as I would have made a terrible prostitute. I could rep for someone else’s wholesale line without blinking, but when it comes to offering my own art, it feels like pulling teeth. Maybe it’s fear of rejection. Maybe it’s something else. Who knows? Regardless, I made my rounds, sold every hummingbird I had, set up follow-up orders, and set off to explore the town that still knows my name.
Exploring Eureka Springs, for me, is like someone studying the back of their own hand. I’ve been all over that town for more than forty years. Every now and then a new shop appears, or someone repaints their house, but beyond that, little changes. And that’s part of its charm.
The outward exploration seldom offers anything new; it’s the inward exploration that keeps calling me back. The springs especially are my places of prayer, memory, and discernment. I visited many today, some twice, and spent time at each one in quiet reflection before packing up my doll rags and heading toward home.
Fayetteville offers many things, but not the same magic. I spend a lot of time on the bike trails, taking pictures, trying again and again to capture a sunbeam breaking through the trees. In two years I’ve never managed it. Today in Eureka, though, the opportunities were endless. The light gathered itself into grace, and I came away with photographs that finally stirred something in me.
The only moment that stole my peace was at my favorite spring, when a loud family arrived at my favorite spring, complaining about spiders, cold water, damp stones, and then blowing out the seven day prayer candle that locals tend so lovingly. As if that weren’t enough, they lit cheap cigarettes and smoked right inside the spring! Can you imagine?! I had to pray down my wrath. In the words of Forrest Gump, that’s all I have to say about that.
Between visits, I found myself calling about various shops for lease, partly out of habit, partly out of curiosity, because you never know. As I was heading back up Mountain Street to where the Blackbird, my 2006 Ford Explorer, was parked, my phone rang. It was one of the landlords returning my call. A venerable shop owner I’d known for years wanted to show me his space.
So down the hill I trotted, back to Spring Street.
And there it was, a perfect space, with a gracious landlord who liked my work and believed it would be a natural fit for an art glass gallery. I have to admit, I felt the tug. The temptation is real. The space is right. The landlord is right. A door has swung wide open. All I would need to do is walk through it.
And that, of course, is the question.
My mentor, Fr. James Martin, always told me, “Watch for open doors.” This past year has been one closed door after another, personal, ministerial, and professional. Many things in my life have changed as a result. But open doors? None.
Until today.
This door feels unmistakably open. What it means, I don’t yet know. What I’m going to do, I’m not sure. But I am paying attention. I am listening. I am watching.
As I often say:
time will tell the story.
And time, if we let it, is a master of discernment.