Presence

When I got back to the US last week, after almost a month back home in the UK, someone asked why this trip felt different. I’ve made the journey nearly forty times in thirty years, but this one is staying with me.

After sitting with the question, the only word I could offer was presence. For four weeks I was simply there — on trains and tracks, with family and old friends, with myself. Plans shifted, days unfolded, and I didn’t measure or hold. I just stayed.

This poem is what remains.

Four weeks on trains—
curving tracks, fields unfolding,
mile by mile.

I walked the days, unhurried;
let the sky keep its own weather,
let time take its own pace.

Some plans dissolved quietly;
others arrived, unbroken.
I counted nothing.
I carried nothing.

I was present—fully.
in conversations softening,
in silences steadying,
in the small weight of my breath.

I left lighter.
I returned more open.
Not escape,
but staying.

The journey does not end—
it waits each time I breathe,
rails humming beneath me still.