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Dear First U Friends,
Happy Fall. Is this a time of year that is particularly meaningful to you? I always feel enlivened in a unique way these yellow-ing, composting, darker but somehow more golden days.
This past Monday on my day off, Alexis and I took a drive up to the Apple Shed in Readfield, Maine. I spent the first third of my childhood growing up on the campus of Kents Hill School, a boarding school up there. The campus borders an apple orchard, Kents Hill Orchard. The faculty housing we lived in for a few years looked out to the orchard and, to my never-ending joy, our building neighbored the Apple Shed, a little bakery that made the best apple turnovers and cinnamon rolls.
This time of year, without fail, my mind always drifts to Kents Hill, to Readfield, and to the Apple Shed and Orchard. These memories beset me so vividly, so viscerally that I can smell them, taste them, sense the air. This feeling I can only describe as both one of longing and of being - or, in other words, a feeling of belonging.
I am so happy to be back in Maine and able to visit these places now when my mind and body call up these memories. And I have to say, returning to these places, now, some 30 years later, it is so dreamlike to be there. Time just completely melts and collapses on itself when I walk out to that orchard. Such is the power of belonging right? Of knowing a place or a person so well, that they exist beyond time and space for you- in a profound sensory way. I suppose you could just call this experience the work of nostalgia - of our wistfulness for the past, by why lean into cynicism about it all. These deep, visceral memories are more than just sentimental. They are also haunting, enlivening, and mysterious. Our places of deep belonging are lodged in our unconscious, our bodies - our souls. I don’t know about you, but it is places like Kents Hill where many of my dreams take place. Belonging goes deep, my friends!
What smells, tastes, and senses arise for you this time of year and compel your mind to return to or seek out a familiar place? What place(s) do you return to in your dreams? Will you tell me about it? Send me a picture if you have one? Such are the important places that shape our beings, our longings, our experience of belonging. Such are the places that shape us. I love learning about you, my friends - tell me about the place or places you belong.
Yours in cortlands, macs, and patience as I wait for macouns,
Rev. Hillary
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