For most of my life I’ve been grounded.

If I have to choose a word, like my word, the first thing that drips out of my mind is SOLID.

It isn’t as if I am perfectly stable. Not at all. I have wonderfully unstable hours and weeks and years. But I am usually always the one who’s being doing [whatever] for the longest…attended my church the longest, had the same cell phone number for 8 years, the same email address, the same house, lived for my whole life within 20 miles of where I was born.

I’m here. I’m solid. I’m grounded. You know where to find me.

And its likely that http://www.sarahmarkley.com/ will always house some itteration of my blog or a website directing toward me or something.

Some times in my life I’ve view this solidity as a liability. As if my feet, instead of being firmly planted on the earth, were being swallowed up in a swampy mess of mud and concrete. There have been times where I’ve hated my own spot in the world and viewed it as being “stuck” rather than “secure”. How desperately I’ve wanted to extract my feet from the bog and jump. Just jump. To anywhere but here.

Because, now, instead of feeling stuck, I see my groundedness as an asset rather than a liability. I love it that my address has been the same for 6 years. I love it that so many different people have walked through my front door and that if they really needed me, they know where to find me. It is an asset that I can tuck my girls into their beds at night, in their same beds in the same spot in the world as last night.

Instead of stuck in a muddy swamp, my feet are planted in the patchy grass of my backyard, with six-year-old (and older) roots extending as far as I allow them to. And it feels good to be home.

You know where you can find me.

What’s your word?