The Soft Return

You do not have to arrive quietly.

You can come carrying the unfinished conversation, the unanswered message, the thing you forgot and the thing you cannot stop remembering.

You can come with a mind still pacing the corridors of the day.

You can come with shoulders that do not yet believe they are allowed to come down.

There is no entrance exam for rest.

No prize for being the calmest person in the room.

You do not have to empty yourself to be worthy of receiving.

Let the floor begin. Let it take the weight you have been holding without noticing.

Let the blanket cover what does not need to be understood today.

Notice the body beneath the story.

The heel. The hip.

The small rise beneath the ribs.

The places already breathing without waiting for permission.

Perhaps home is not somewhere you finally reach.

Perhaps it begins here:

in the moment you stop asking your body to prove that it deserves your kindness.

Nothing holy has been lost because you opened your eyes.

Nothing disappeared when the final note became silence.

The room is still here.

Your body is still here.

The world that we call ordinary is waiting:

Your shoes beside the mat,
the creases in the blanket tell of the rest you have taken,

The pavements and buses our side are full of people and bustle,
There is lunch to consider and laundry, there may be messages asking for answers.

But perhaps the ordinary is not waiting to take the magick away.

Perhaps this is where the magick was going.

Into the hands that will lift your cup and the feet that will carry you home.

Into the breath you may remember to take in the middle of something difficult.

Into the moment you notice that you are leaving yourself—and choose, without punishment, to return.

Home is not perfect stillness.

It is not a body without pain, a mind without noise or a life that never asks too much.

Home is the small, living choice not to abandon yourself when the noise begins again.

So, return with the room.

Return with the breath.

Return without rushing.

Bring back whatever is yours:

the warmth, the space, the unanswered question,
the strange new softness.

You don’t need to hold onto it tightly.

And, you do not need to turn it into a lesson.

Let it become ordinary. Let it live beside the washing up. Let it meet you at the crossing.

And let it sit inside of you as the day becomes itself again.

The magick was never asking you to stay elsewhere. Or do something worthy of it.

It was asking to come home with you. To be recognised as you.

I am here.

I am held.

I am home.