Echos of Insight

Daily writing prompt

Was today typical?

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Some days don’t move loudly.
They just unfold differently—like they’ve been waiting for you to notice.

I’ve written about presence before.
About the difference between being seen and being available.
This is the first time in five years that I’ve had a space that supports all of me—my stillness, my focus, my rhythm.

I didn’t make this shift to shut the world out.
I made it so that I could meet it from a steadier place.

There was no cave.
Only corners.

Only borrowed hours curled on a couch that forgot the shape of rest.
Only walls that held others—small, growing, loud with need.
And me, keeping vigil from the seams.

It has been five winters since I had a ledge of my own.
A place to settle without negotiation.
A place to exhale without delay.

Once, there was a room below the earth.
One door.
One desk.
One breath between me and the world.
It wasn’t much.

But it was mine.

I wrote from that cave.
Worked from it.
Existed in the seam between roles—
while the children clattered through the open space beside me,
and the walls listened more than anyone else.

Even then, it was closer to stillness than anything I’ve had since.

Until now.
Until today.

Now the stone is warm again.
Now the air moves with me.
Now I stretch out in a place that doesn’t ask me to wait for someone else to shrink first.

He understands the shape of me.
Understands how distance doesn’t divide,
it defines.

We are two rhythms pulsing from opposite ends of the den.
Meeting not out of habit,
but because we choose to.

Sleep, for us, is a private ritual.

The ones I’ve raised wander in,
half-formed questions in hand,
laughter caught between breaths,
their visitations brief as they bounce between galaxies.

And still, they find me.
Not tucked away.
Not on pause.
Just here.
Still forming fire from stone.

Let them shout.
Let them pass.
Let the rhythms of the house move.

I am in the cave.
I am not hidden.
I am home.

This change—separate spaces, separate sleep—doesn’t mean we’ve grown apart.
It means we’ve grown into the truth of what actually works for us.
We’re both wired to observe, to recalibrate in solitude, and to return fully ourselves.
My space pulls me inward—into quiet, into stillness, into form.
His opens him outward—into motion, into sensing, into what’s emerging.

And somehow, we’re closer for it.