This will be the last guest column I write for the Statesman as my wife and I soon make our way to our new home in Connecticut. Alix now retires from the faculty of Dell Medical School and from her physician position at Dell Medical Center’s intensive care unit. There she has served for 21 years, treating children struggling with medical challenges most of us can’t imagine. She’s loved working with the amazing, dedicated team there. Her own health has now led her to conclude it’s time to hang up her stethoscope.

This job opportunity brought us here and as it winds down, we leave to be closer to both our families on the East Coast.

Even though I’ve resided at 25 different addresses, I still hate moving. Leaving Austin, where I’ve made so many good friends and passionate, talented colleagues, will leave a scar. Still, I’ve done my part to keep Austin weird, and the city’s done its part in nurturing my writing and my faith. When we load that last box onto its POD and hop a plane to lift off from Austin-Bergstrom International Airport one last time, I will feel as if I’ve been cowboy booted from the womb.

Serendipitously, this parting will occur during the nine-night Hindu festival of Navaratri. These holy days focus on the goddess Durga and her victory of good over evil but more broadly on feminine divinity. The festival begins with the ritual of Ghatasthapana involving a pot filled with water and grains, symbolizing the womb of the goddess.

As I reflect upon the significance of this celebration for my Hindu friends, I cannot help but think of the countless occasions in which I’ve gathered with other Austinites under the shadow of the Goddess of Liberty, perched atop our lovely rose granite capitol. There she extends 16 feet into the rare air to achieve a height beyond that of our national capitol.

“What hutzpah!” proved my first response when I read these words to my children in hopes of orienting them to their new home. None of us, arriving in hot, hot August, fared very well after our entry from the much more temperate Pacific Northwest. Not even an application of Amy’s Ice Creams lowered our core temperature enough to keep us from feeling like strangers in a strange land.

Driving home from our visit to the Bob Bullock Historical Museum, my 4-year-old son Liam pleaded from the back seat of our minivan, “I want blackberries.” “No problem,” I quickly shot back, “I’ll stop at H-E-B on our way home.” “No, I want my blackberries,” he persisted.

In Liam’s mind we’d only begun a family vacation — one where we packed up everything we owned and dragged it halfway across the country. My son longed for the fleshpots of the blackberry bushes that overflowed the back fence of our Tacoma home. We plucked them every morning for our breakfast. Liam wanted this comfort food to assure him he was home.

When we took the kids to the annual Christmas sing-along, led by the late KUT host, John Aielli, a few months later, our kids joined the others rolling down the grassy knolls of the state capitol grounds under the evening gaze of the goddess. They began to feel a bit more like they belonged here, floating freely in their new Lone Star womb. Seeing them do so, helped Alix and I relax as well into Austin living. Faith that we’d all be alright slowly rose in our chests.

We would return many times to that lawn for protests as well as celebrations. The most outstanding moment for me: the first international women’s march in 2017. Putting politics aside, what stood out most was the diversity of the crowd, 75,000 strong. On Congress Avenue, I could begin to see the words newly placed atop Contemporary Austin museum: “With Liberty and Justice for All.” That day “all” meant folks of every gender, age and race, armed with walkers, strollers and signs of every size and variety. I thought of some of the awesome women Austin had produced: Barbara Jordan, Ann Richards, Lady Bird Johnson, Mollie Ivans, Nancy Flores, and I was never prouder of the town I now resided in.

Long before we as a culture began to recognize gender as far more fluid than previously conceived, the psychologist Carl Jung posited that we as individuals host both an anima and an animus, i.e. male and female sides. I wonder if Jung would’ve entertained the notion that cities too exhibit non-binary aspects. I think it’s fair to say that Texas, in the eyes of the world, projects a strong animus or machismo, but what about Austin?

The Sanskrit word for the divine feminine is shakti — showcasing the virtues of protection, wealth and knowledge. Might we claim that in housing the University of Texas the city serves up knowledge; in housing corporate headquarters, it serves up wealth; and in housing the state legislature, it serves up protection? Perhaps, but does not the city’s shakti shine in other ways? Does not one feel nested in a womb when observing the magical, massive release of Mexican free-tailed bats on summer evenings? Does not one hear a uterine hum as diverse musical strains pour from multiple portals nightly?

My friend, India Diaspora poet Usha Akella, recently asked local poets to offer up poems celebrating Austin for a city-focused anthology. I submitted the following:

Rain, snakes & ribbons

When we came, it rained in torrents

Welcome to Texas, said a stranger at the airport,

Would you prefer drought or flood?

When we came, we lacked a cat;

She’d run away the night before we left

The Pacific Northwest for Austin

When we came, the western coral snakes

Sashayed out to greet us

On our front porch, I’d learn,

When we came, that an anti-venom

For its tiny bite was no longer in production

I began to find it hard to function

When we came, we could not find our phones,

Before our prevalent cells abounded,

Among our many cardboard boxes

When we came, I found it nearly

Impossible to communicate my loss

Of everything I knew in this strange land

When we came to the Congress Avenue Bridge,

I watched fruit bats become a ribbon of harvest,

Consuming its weight in bugs and lugging

Me along with it, when we came,

Trolling me through the crepuscular dusk —

Folding me into this foreign scorch of sun,

Baking me, when we came — savaging

My past yet soothing with one Lyle Lovett chorus:

That’s right, you’re not from Texas;

Texas wants you anyhow, when we came

Where the rain let up, phones and a cat reemerged,

Snakes never aggressed, bats consistently ribboned

The sky, and time like lyrics licked, when we came,

Our anxiety blessedly

Texasly away

I pray that the anima — the shakti — of Austin continue to relieve your every anxiety, after my family and I depart from its womb. I pray your respective faiths enable you to coexist lovingly and peacefully under the gaze of our Goddess of Liberty and that the golden star within her grip continue to brightly burn within you.

Terry Dawson is an ordained Presbyterian minister and former adjunct faculty member of San Francisco Theological Seminary.