I have said so many good-byes this past week but all of them felt half-hearted on my part. Mostly, I think, because I don’t feel like I am leaving.

I finished my last shift of work on Sunday and moved my last box out of my room today. It is the eve of my sabbatical, as one friend called it, and for the first time in my life I don’t have a designated place to call home, nor do I have work or school to wake up to in the morning. The ramifications of this are just now sinking in, as if my heart and lungs were finding a new rhythm to call normal.

Until now I hadn’t been able to take it all in. Even just the amount of love and appreciation from my patients was enough to make me stop and wonder how I could hold that much emotion.

So many of them told me they would miss me, that I had touched their lives, and that knowing me had meant a lot to them. I felt words were completely inadequate to tell them how much knowing them had meant to me, how working with them had changed me and made me grow up. It occurred to me how easy it is to forget the importance of our every-day interactions. So many times my patients brought me out of a sour mood. Working with them was an excuse to be my best self. To see how the simple things I did made such an impact on them astounded me. But, maybe that’s what community is after all: the consciousness of our responsibility to each other even in the smallest of things. In such a frenzied world the weight of that is immense.

Now is the time of year when the world pauses to drink in the abundance of summer. The sunlight shifts to yellow; lines blur and become hazy. We are just on the precipice of fall, tipping but not yet tumbling down the slope to winter. And, in this moment that is also my life. I want to pause and take it all in. I intend to use the privilege I have of wondering what to with my life to explore my options in their fullest. My goal is to travel, but more in mind than body. I don’t intend to leave Portland, or at least not for very long. Portland is still my home and between my wanderings I intend to return to it. I felt that I was stagnating in the life I was living and needed to make a change. Every other time this has happened I had some structured plan, but not this time. This time nothing solid manifested, no matter how much I wanted it to. This time I had to close doors and simply have faith that others would open. I don’t yet know what those will be, but I believe they will be magical. So far this experience has already been both terrifying and exhilarating, one of the most vulnerable things I have ever done. I see very clearly how cared for I am by other human beings, from the friend who is offering space to store my stuff and a warm place to sleep to other friends who have offered their credit cards in case of emergency. I feel very humble and grateful for the generous hearts around me, who so lovingly hold me in these tender moments.