MY SOUL PLACE

For as long as I can remember, I’ve always had a “soul place".  A soul place is a spot where I go to think, to write in my journal, to write music, to read, to write letters, to figure things out in my head and heart.  It’s where I feed my soul.  It has always been someplace close by, someplace beautiful, and someplace I could spend hours of time recalibrating.  I have moved a lot in my lifetime, but I have always found a new soul place at each point in my journey.

 

When I was a little girl, my soul place was the window seat in my bedroom that looked out on my backyard in Bartlett, Tennessee.  It’s where I read Pride & Prejudice and Little Women, where I wrote poems, where I dreamed of life and love, where I wished on stars at night.  It looked a lot like this, but this room is much neater than mine ever was!

I now live in Lakeside-Marblehead, Ohio, a lovely little village on Lake Erie located between Cleveland and Toledo.  I like living here because it is incredibly beautiful in every season, it has wonderful birds and wildlife, and the people and town are charming.  I probably won’t live here forever, so I find myself drinking in as much of it as I can each day.  Today was a sunny heat wave (16 degrees!) so I got all bundled up and went for a walk to my soul place.

I live about 5 minutes walk from a historic lighthouse – the Marblehead Lighthouse.  It is the oldest lighthouse in continuous operation on the US side of the Great Lakes.  It has 77 steps (I’ve walked each one), it was built in 1821, and is made of Lake Erie limestone.   I took this picture today, and it is still decked out for Christmas - just like my home, unfortunately!   

This lighthouse is the most photographed place in the state of Ohio and has over 1 million visitors each year.  But that’s not why I walk there nearly each day.  I go there because it is my soul place.

I usually sit on these rocks you see in this picture, although it looks much different in the summertime.  In this very spot, I have written hundreds of pages of thoughts in my journal, I’ve written many songs, and I’ve had some life changing conversations.  Several years ago I sat here in my car during a terrible thunderstorm and had a very long talk with a dear friend.  I remember watching the waves crash over the rocks as the rain poured and the wind howled.  My heart felt a lot like that storm back then.  That talk was one of those “lighthouse” kinds of experiences that brought me much clarity, direction and peace.  I think that’s when this truly became my soul place. 

This little stretch of woods pictured above is one of my favorite places in the park.  It has a short path that winds through this wooded area, and in the springtime it offers some of the best birding in the world!   I saw 24 species of warblers in these woods last May.  (If you are one of my birding friends, you’ll be impressed.)  There are great birds in this park all year round:  shorebirds, warblers, ducks, swallows, and too many more to name.  Today I actually saw “Seven swans-a-swimming” (mute swans).  They are in the photo below, but the swans are a bit difficult to see along the waterline.

One of the songs I completed here is called “Tiny Spirit”.  I’m part of a band called The Rain Crows, and this song is the final track on our most recent CD, “Dream Of Flying Dream”.  I’ll write more about The Rain Crows later – they are an amazing, talented bunch of people, and I’m lucky to be able to make music with them.  “Tiny Spirit” was co-written by one of my band mates, Bill Thompson, but all of our recorded songs are originals, and all of The Rain Crows have a hand in songwriting.   If you’d like to listen to this song and others from our 2 CD projects, you can listen on Spotify, or you can follow this link for samples of each song:

http://www.cdbaby.com/cd/theraincrows2

If you don’t have a soul place, I hope you’ll find one.

But it’s much more likely that it will find you.