Your Weekly Lantern Note: The Balcony Still Faces the Same Way | Going Home
The Balcony Still Faces the Same Way
The view I woke up to.
I stayed at my parents' house last weekend.
I woke early, the way I always do in that house — some old rhythm it still keeps in me, no matter how many years I've been gone. I stood at the sliding doors in my bare feet and pajamas and watched the sun come up over the balcony, and I took a picture of it.
I'm not entirely sure who I took it for.
That balcony is one of the places younger me became a writer, long before I would have said that word out loud about myself. Late nights out there. Early mornings, too. Me and a notebook and whatever I was carrying that week, pouring my thoughts onto paper--in poem form more often then not back then.
I wasn't writing for anyone. That's the part I keep turning over. There was no audience, no platform, no plan. I was a girl working something out in the dark with a pen, and the page was simply the first place that would take it all without flinching.
I didn't know then that I was practicing.
Here's what struck me standing at those doors last weekend: the house hasn't changed much. The rail is the same rail. The light comes up over the same trees in the same place it always has. That view has been running on schedule this whole time, whether I was there to see it or not.
I'm the one who changed.
I stepped out onto the balcony and took a second picture, this one with nothing in the way. Same sun. Same trees. Same little town waking up underneath it. No frame.
That's most of what the years have done, if I'm honest. For a long time I looked at my own life through something — a door, a role, a version of myself I thought I was supposed to present. Now I mostly just allow myself to take it all in, and appreciate it for exactly what it is.
The woman at the sliding door has a career she loves, a marriage, grown children, perfect grandbabies, and books with her name on them. She's been through things the girl on the balcony couldn't have imagined and wouldn't have believed she'd survive.
But that girl was surviving a truth of her own out there. She was carrying something, and she was feeling around in the dark for the path toward healing before she had any language for either one. She just didn't know that's what she was doing. She thought she was only writing.
And the woman at the door still gets up before the sun, and still puts the thing she's carrying onto a page, because it turns out that was never a phase. It was the beginning of something bigger.
I think we underestimate our anchor places.
We treat them like scenery — the childhood bedroom, the porch, the pew, the stretch of road. But an anchor place isn't scenery. It's a fixed point you can measure yourself against. You go back and stand in it and the distance between who you were there and who you are now becomes suddenly, almost unbearably visible.
That's not nostalgia. Nostalgia wants to go backward. This is something else. This is proof.
Speak truth. Trust yourself. Anchor here. You're okay.
Anchor here has become the line people ask me about most often, and I'm not sure I've ever explained it as well as that balcony does. Anchoring isn't staying put. It's knowing where your fixed point is, so that when the water gets rough you have some way of telling how far you've actually come.
So I took the picture.
For the girl who sat out there at two in the morning with a notebook, mostly. I'd tell her that the writing was worth it, that somebody eventually reads it, that the things she's afraid to say out loud are the exact things that will connect her to other people someday.
But mostly I'd tell her that she was already doing it right. That putting it on the page in the dark, with no audience and no plan, was never a small thing.
Same notebook habit. Different view.
If you have a balcony — an anchor place, a fixed point, somewhere that knew you before you had a single thing figured out, where you first told yourself the truth with nobody listening — go stand in it this fall. Not to move back in. Just to see just how far the water has carried you.
I promise the view is still there.
With love & light (and a dose of home),
Heather
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