Top SF Realtor POV: Still and Still Moving

by Cynthia Cummins

Cynthia is owner and founder of Kindred SF Homes and a top San Francisco Realtor. Check out RealEstateTherapy.org for refreshing reflections on the meaning of home and for more “best real estate advice (since 2013).

Reading time: 2 minutes

We interrupt this home selling offer writing tenant wrangling property marketing paper signing hand holding question answering day to bring you this vaguely real-estate-related post in honor of the approaching Autumn Equinox.

I’m always looking for quotes, anecdotes and writings on the theme of home. I use them as a jumping off point for Real Estate Therapy blogs, and I sneak snippets of poetry and prose into marketing materials willy nilly. It makes my work more fun (for me) and helps me connect with my deeper purpose and with other human beings

One delightful result of this was meeting a wonderful new friend who – when she received one of my Just Listed postcards – contacted me to ask if the line I’d used by T. S. Eliot was legit.

“Home is where one starts from,” is indeed from an Eliot poem. The lines are from Four Quartets, in the subsection entitled East Coker. It’s the last half of section V:

Home is where one starts from. As we grow older

the world becomes stranger, the pattern more complicated

Of dead and living. Not the intense moment

Isolated, with no before and after,

But a lifetime burning in every moment

And not the lifetime of one man only

But of old stones that cannot be deciphered.

There is a time for the evening under starlight,

A time for the evening under lamplight

(The evening with the photograph album).

Love is most nearly itself

When here and now cease to matter.

Old men ought to be explorers

Here or there does not matter

We must be still and still moving

Into another intensity

For a further union, a deeper communion

Through the dark cold and the empty desolation,

The wave cry, the wind cry, the vast waters

Of the petrel and the porpoise. In my end is my beginning.

I don’t know about YOU but – wow – every time I read those words I’m filled with gratitude for my eyesight and my education. “The lifetime burning in every moment.”  “Old stones that cannot be deciphered.” “In my end is my beginning.” “We must be still and still moving.”

Happy equinox. May you enjoy many bright days of exploration and many quiet evenings under lamplight or starlight.

Photo Credit: Adrian Moran