A titleless journey, returning home.
I’ve been through an unruly swirling of emotions today on the theme of home. Be prepared for a longy (but still a goody!).
This post is stemming from the roots of something I wanted to share more personally with a friend, who is on her own profound return-to-home journey right now. But as I was processing the emotions of the day, whilst trying to cook dinner, I felt that Yes - I needed to write, and Yes - this is the topic. So now my husband is cooking, and I am sitting down writing instead.
We are travelling right now.
We left “home” a few days ago, stopped off for a few days 300km north in my birth-town and are about to continue our journey another 2,500km north from here. Just a wee trip! Actually, it’s a legit pilgrimage. One I’ll no doubt write about in the coming weeks. We are travelling to another land that we visit at this time each year. An ancient land of remembering. A place I also feel deeply at home.
Right now, I am sitting on the couch of a family home, in a physical place; a physical home, an emotional home. Experiencing nostalgia and a familiarity. Last night I visited another home I once lived in, and have re-grounded in many times, with my mother, who still lives there. My home, again.
Actually, just to throw a spanner in the works, we technically don’t even have a “home” right now as we sold our house last year and decided to essentially become nomads as we redefine home. So right now all our belongings are in a caravan or storage container and we have no material roots at all. An awkward LOL feels appropriate here.
I’m effectively homeless and yet the most at home I’ve ever been.
Alright, it’s just getting arbitrary saying the word home now. I’ll stop.
As I sit here, and tune into the frequency of what Home means to me (sorry, I will have to say it a few more times), I am drawn to an experience I felt this morning. A feeling of laying in bed, looking out an open window, witnessing a mulberry tree bud fresh green leaves after the winter, the wetness of the spring rain (which somehow feels wetter than any other time of year), the steam rising from the warm soil, the earthy smell of overgrown nasiturums, the dance of bird calls delighting in each other, the not-too-early and not-too-late rising of the sun that happens uniquely around the time of the Equinox.
Can you drop into that experience?
Tune into the richness of a simple breath and all that it holds?
What I witnessed from my bed this morning are beautiful things to witness and observe when we slow down and listen and see the natural World around us. Our Earthly home.
But they become even more beautiful when we overlay them with nostalgia.
Remembering of a time experienced once before.
A feeling of “this is home”. I know this.
A feeling of listening to the land, the earth, the Universe pulsing with you.
There are, like all things, many ways to relate to Home.
Of course there are the the obvious ones. Home is a representation of shelter and safety. It is where the heart is. It is inside ourselves. It is a physical or emotional place of time once lived. It’s where your Soul feels familiarity. It is with people who ignite your Base Charka.
Honestly, it’s not something I’ve spent too long really reflecting on consciously, yet it seems it has been a woven thread throughout my life. Especially in the last decade as I have rooted into a single physical place, and unrooted again.
I think all humans have innately worn the wounds of “home” in some way or another. Home is the foundation from which we grow our roots.
Without roots, the tree falls in the wind.
At this moment in time, I’ve come to realise the best way for me to explain my relationship to home is a bit like how I would explain any other relationship or marriage.
Relationships.
The relating of someone or something to one’s Self.
Relationships.
How we understand and feel connection to the Other, the Whole.
Relationships.
Healthy ones usually require intimacy, trust, truth, effort, growth, acceptance and reciprocity. Unhealthy ones end up looking different.
It doesn’t matter who you are with, there will always be a karmic imprint or soul blueprint necessary to be explored in a relationship. Necessary to be explored in a home.
Depending on who you are, you might need to have lots of partners, lots of homes, for your potential. Or you might just need one to share life with and adventure with. Perhaps you’ll need a bit of A) in some parts of your life, and a bit of B) in other parts of your life. I’m not here to tell you what another Soul needs.
But I do know, individually and collectively, we have a lot of unconditional and conditional programming relating to relationships.
Our relationship to home is no exception.
Some of which remains evolutionarily necessary, and some which has come time to release.
Perhaps I’ve been a hopeless romantic, looking on the horizon, thinking my dream partner (home) is out there somewhere, not realising they were standing right in front of me all the time. Like a true Disney classic.
I’ve regularly suffered a feeling of longing to be elsewhere with my sense of place throughout my life.
Something has shifted in this way for me over the last year or two though.
I think I had to release everything, including an attachment to a physical home, to truly have the space to understand what Home meant for me.
I think I had to release the distractions of my material life, to truly have the space to see how at home I truly could be, inside myself.
I had to let go of all that I’d built, to see all that I have.
Nothing + everything.
The theme of these stories.
***
Today, a beautiful well-wishing text from a friend back in my current Hometown set me off. I realised I was missing home. Even though we’d only just left.
I was experiencing a longing to go back to my community. My people. My sense of place. To be deeply engaged in purpose, relating to others and nature. Feeling wholeness.
The rest of the world, the grandiose potential of life, with all that it brings, and which has and can offer me so much joy and freshness, just does not feel that important to me in the bigger picture of things at the moment.
The interesting part about this longing, was that it was only hours before I was visiting my Aunty in her new home with my grandmother and my children. There we were; 4 generations having a cup of milky tea, cheese and bickies, and an apple cake. Smack bang in the the ‘burbs of Middle Australia.
I felt at peace. Deeply at home.
Even though, when I used to write out my “dream life”, this kind of simplicity and mediocracy was about as far from it as you could get.
Nowadays, the peace that comes from being so content in simple, meaningful experiences, with family, is exactly my dream life and experience.
(I don’t think my family can still believe that I’ve started joining them in a cup of Twinings instead of some new age herbal concoction, though!)
I remind myself - we’re just spiritual beings having a human experience, after all. (Not just human beings having a spiritual experience. Get that distinction?) And there I was, enjoying my human experience deeply, because I had surrendered the need for it to be anything more than it was.
Connection.
Relating.
Being.
No added meaning, fluff, lack, or story. No stress, righteousness or particularity.
The shift in my energy that came later, the unruliness, upon reflection had nothing to do with home, but to do with a safety response triggered in my Base Chakra by taking on board the wounding of some people around me. Which is not my story to tell, and not even my pain to experience. So I released it promptly.
Nonetheless, I was grateful. Because when I poked and prodded it a bit more, this idea and the clarity of home embodying the characteristics of a relationship came to me. And I unlocked myself to write this.
It’s probably as simple as this.
I don’t want to live my life alone or just for me.
Alone inside of myself.
Perpetuating separateness.
I don’t think any of us do.
We are innately, spiritually and biologically, geared to be part of something beyond us. A community. With others. Part of the Whole.
And actually, the ultimate vision of selling our home last year on the material plane, was to find + build community. To buy land or invest into a new or exisiting community. Because even the separateness of our 4 walls felt no longer aligned for our highest vision. Intimacy. Shared living. A relaxing into truly being with Others in Oneness. Truth in the Whole. These ideals felt closer to the necessary next step for our life and future.
There are plenty of places we could have moved to in the World where these things already exist. But that wasn’t the point either. This move wasn’t just about us.
This process has been an interesting one. I am surrendered to the adventure of it. The timing and the unfolding. Because this journey is not just mine, within my control. It requires deep patience and trust.
It’s not just me that’s coming home, this time.
The others are too.
I have to wait for them.
And I have to go first in the meantime.
***
My return-to-home journey started about 11 years ago.
Just before my birthday on 11/11/11.
I had left Australia (my home country) on a one-way ticket thinking that I would never return “home”. That my life and my purpose would not be found in these lands. But just before my 23rd birthday, I found myself longing to find roots.
My life and ambitions before that had been expansively global.
I was working hard to fulfil the trajectory of having a particular scholarship at the World Bank, that I could only receive at 26 years old. I had 3 years left and I was on target. I was a bullseye shooter.
After a skiing accident, where I had to learn to walk again, feeling very alone one Christmas in San Fransisco, I took a slight turn in my path. Accidents that stop you from walking are powerful reminders that perhaps it’s time to change direction, or ‘stop walking on the current path’. Literally. I’ve had a few of them in my life now.
I had a crossroads in front of me.
But returning “home” to Australia was never even a consideration. I truly believed my path was somehow above and beyond the places of my childhood, and I could never be content pursuing my goals there.
I had to choose between how I was going to go forward. I had two new career options in front of me. Life was only about career at this point in my life. So I had to choose between a highly career-oriented job (which was actually epic and required regular travel to Costa Rica) or a paying-pittance but play-with-dolphins-on-an-island-every-day kind of job.
I chose the dolphins.
I was still young, and if I didn’t do something like that then, then when would I?
That’s what I convinced myself then. But I know now, it was a yearning to get off the wagon and return to my inner home. A deep knowing that my trajectory of forward momentum was not what my soul truly needed.
The ocean had always been “home” to me. Or so I used to say in a sort of cliche 90’s sun sticker kind of way. It was a safe (in the externalised kind of way) first step coming back to my Truth. My journey living on the Island was deeply profound, and cannot be captured here. But how I see it relating to this topic is a bit like this:
I spent the first half of my life doing endless metaphoric yoga teacher training courses. Initiations. (Like living on the Island).
But I did not become a yogi until I showed up on the mat every in my daily home practice.
This experience activated the realisation there-was-more-to-life than upwards and outwards and expansion.
Back in 2011, I started to revel in the motto: Think global, act local.
Another “career front” for a deeper truth that was unfolding.
It was my justification that I could still do “big things”, but actually the greatest impact I would have, would be the places and the lives that I could physically touch with my being.
I still believe this to be true.
Perhaps even moreso now.
The question I had to face at the time was - but where would I put down my roots?
Here is a post I wrote on my travel blog at the time, realising it was time for me to “go home”, a month before I came back to Australia. Surrendering to the idea I was sort of “forced” to go back to Australia. Although we all know (after my last post!) that if I wanted something enough, I would have made it happen. Subconsciously, I was happy to have a reason to explore the idea of going home.
I found this old blog after a series of events recently led me to it. I found an app that prints old blogs into hard copy books and got it shipped to me. It arrived just the other day. The timing was part of another series of synchronicities.
I returned home to Western Australia.
I was born there, I spent the first 12 years of my life there and my parents and my maternal family were there.
But I admit that Perth, the capital city of WA, that I landed in, did not feel like “home” for me. And it hadn’t been for nearly half my life.
Australia. My country. Western Australia. My state. On the other hand, had a strong “home” energy. But Perth? It wasn’t really there.
Despite being born there, I think I was never really connected to it as “my place”, partly because I never felt like my feet were on the ground, so I never had a correlating sense of place in any sense anyway. I went to lots of different schools. I didn’t have a strong community linked to a place. I had very strong, meaningful childhood friendships I maintained regardless. But they were individual. Not so much part of a collective or connected to a location.
To add to it, my parents both had gypsy / traveller imprints, and I’m sure that played a roll in not feeling rooted to a place. I travelled internationally to visit family in Europe from a young age. I travelled across the country by myself on an aeroplane when I was just 6 years old to visit my Dad who lived in Sydney. We also did the “live in a caravan” thing when I was young. Travel was in my blood. I was aware of the World. I valued it.
I did not really “value” sleepy old backwards WA.
Which felt so very plain and uncultured compared to “the rest of the world”.
Or at least that’s how my oh-so-sophisticated teenage self saw it anyway. The oh-so-sophisticated teenager that lived in a bush shack in the Northern Territory outback, whose only pair of shoes were some red-dust stained thongs (flip flops) and who shopped at Valley Girl for the rest.
I travelled fairly consistently, mostly on my own accord, for nearly a decade before I returned home at 23. I travelled to nearly every continent for work / school / scholarships. It wasn’t travel for play or holidays or your typical youthful adventure. It was travel for life. My life was global. I missed spending my major birthdays (my 18th and 21st) with my family and lived in a state of unwavering determination and outward ambition.
This “bigness” was part of my Soul’s blueprint.
I remember going to a conference in Indonesia and the older members of the delegate ordered the same sorts of Indonesian foods every meal. I remember ordering a whole fish (even though I didn’t like fish) and other wildy different dishes I’d never tried before. I couldn’t understand why they would stoop to the familiar when there were so many new things to try. Most of which I didn’t really enjoy. But it was nonetheless part of the experience! People didn’t run their digital nomad businesses from Canggu yet. Indo was still fresh, in the OG kind of way.
One of my Professors told me - at a certain point in your life, you just know yourself enough to know what you like.
Ugghhh. Major eye roll. I remember how I couldn’t stand hearing this at 18 years old. How boring, I thought. I hoped at the time I would never end up like that.
Fast forward to now: I order the exact same burger every time we go to a burger shop. Any burger shop. Any country. Mustard and pickles. I know what I like.
Circling back to Home.
By the time I was 23, I felt like I had already experienced the entire world.
The external.
There weren’t many corners “out there” I hadn’t explored.
Of course throughout the rest of my 20’s, I continued to travel to new places, have new experiences, and I don’t think I’ll ever stop travelling as long as I have the privilege.
The difference being now, is that I no longer need to for my Soul’s evolution.
I’m not just saying that.
After spending so much of my life ungrounded, resisting the idea of being locked into a place, similar to how the 00’s Bachelor resists the idea of true intimacy in the mundane, I am now actually content without it.
I think it would not actually matter to me if I never travelled again for the rest of my life.
And sometimes I think how much happier I would be if I didn’t have the option to.
External experiences still provide delicious nectar for me to drink. I won’t deny myself of them. But I recognise they no longer sustain me.
A trip up to the City every now and then to indulge artisan cafe culture, hole-in-the-wall whiskey bars, theatre, antique dress stores and that faster pace and more exclusive things only found in metropolitan hubs, satisfies the parts of my soul which craves the sensual pleasures, luxury and richness of the material world.
But after a short while, after my fix, it has served its purpose and I’m done.
My husband laughs whenever we visit somewhere new, as I always enter this imaginative state of trying to figure out what life would be like if we lived there and all ways we could make it possible… and wonderful. He knows that he has to smile and nod for a few days, before I realise that I am just (very intensely!) distracted by shiny things again.
But shiny things are indeed a distraction.
I haven’t done much international travel in recent years for obvious reasons, but even still, I remember having the same inklings of this-is-so-freaking-epic-but…. on other big trips before the world went cray.
New and different cultures and experiences inevitably delight me. But after a prolonged (or even just short) periods of them, I start to crave simplicity and familiarity again.
I’m continuously brought back to the freedom of simplicity. Less.
In my search for Place over the last decade, I also realised that like a marriage - there is a deep necessity for reciprocity.
Home is not a one sided well from which we drink for our own personal needs, peace and contentment.
We are merely custodians of Place.
The Earth is not actually something we can own. Such that we cannot own our partner.
But we usually see Place in a very self-centred way - what can get from this place? Not what can I give to it?
Imagine if we took that approach in our relationships.
It took time before I started to truly connect with the land we live on now.
My husband and I moved to the South West about 5-6 years ago. We had recently gotten engaged prior and had the intention of becoming a family. We knew it would not be aligned for us to undertake that journey in the city. So we moved.
It felt like we had stayed in the city, until this moment, somewhat by divine default.
We both landed there around the same time in 2011, we met, we moved in together, we fell into careers and study, and a life, adulting. We started accumulating “things”. Fancy pots, cutlery, bedding, veggie garden, chooks etc. We had a cute little beach shack right on the ocean, opposite Perth’s best surf break, next to a hip surf cafe. We ran epic community projects, were at the centre of beautiful social entrepreneur and impact driven community, and were creating new templates for living all round. We made the most of it. There was plenty of opportunity and meaningful living. We were doing different soul work at the time, and Place played a different importance then. It was not so relevant.
When Place became more relevant, the South West felt felt like a natural move. We were nature-loving surfy people. So we moved to the nature-loving surf epicentre of our region, still within driving distance to family, our life and our projects.
But once we “settled” and mortgaged up, we continued to question - is this it?
Of all the magical places we could live in the world (a beach shack in Hawaii, a condo in Mexico, a villa in Hossegor, a Nordic Farmhouse. Expansive views over the ocean. Land. Farm. Mountains… kind of thing), was this it for us?
Life is obviously not a destination. But the desire to put in roots was there, so there were inherent decisions we needed to make.
Life in the South West ticked so many boxes on the surface.
But we were still always dreaming. Always questioning. One foot out the door.
Because it could be.
The land, and my reciprocated experience of it, could feel this. Like a scorned woman who gave her all to an uncommitted man with a foot still out the door. Her wounds of safety were enraged. There was no trust. Because she was not being truly honoured.
When we moved there, it was like the Earth, the forests, the soil, the ocean, the song was testing me first.
She didn’t just allow me into her. She needed to trust me first. And I needed to see her and revere her for her Truth, in reciprocity.
My cool coyness with Place was no longer serving my highest human potential.
We’ve worked through this though.
Now, she is me.
We are one.
But I used to deeply resist many aspects of her.
I have my Mars in Aries line (astro-cartography) running right along the Cape (to the exact kilometre). It’s a strong energy here for me.
Big moving intense work, bringing forth big moving intense energy in me.
Plus it is my birth home. All the wounds of the Base Chakra are inevitably raw here. Hence my sympathy experience earlier.
But my Mars (Aries) is directly linked to my North Node (Pisces), my ultimate soul’s potential. Both in the 9th House of Spirituality.
This land provides the ultimate potential for me to find Wholeness.
The yin yang of my potential, and potential of the Collective.
Power and peace.
Everything + nothing.
I remember when the Marsh / March flies would first come out in the early summer to feed from the Marri Tree flowers. I would get devoured by them. Covered in welts. Anxiety and trauma followed. I hated them. I was at a bush-bash birthday party (midst being annihilated) and I asked a friend who lived on the land how she coped with them. She said she didn’t notice them. She walked in harmony with the land, and the land walked in harmony with her. I felt despair hearing this. Was I not in harmony with the land?
Perhaps I wasn’t at the time. But I believe I am in harmony with the land these days, and I still get smashed by Marsh flies. So I don’t think it’s because I’m not Buddha. Perhaps they are just attracted to my sweet blood / skin. I am nonetheless mindful not to expose myself to them on the few days of the year they are prolific. It’s just something I’ve come to accept.
The land and I have found our unique dance. The nuances of our unique relationship. Which will no doubt evolve, like any relationship as we growth together.
This understanding has come with time.
Many seasons. Over and over.
This kind of trust and intimacy that comes with time.
There is no shortcutting that.
A marriage 1 year in, is not the same as 10 years in, is not the same as 40 years in.
Some things can only be lived, not learned, not initiated.
The same goes for the Community which I now call home as well.
Even though I only lived in my mothers current house for 1-2 years before we moved to the tropics over 20 years ago now, her neighbours in every house all around her had been there for decades, generations (it is quite Italian in that way). She kept the house and we’ve returned there many times, and now she’s been there for a long time herself. I feel truly loved by the neighbours there. Like my own family.
There is something about knowing your neighbours, in the kind of way where you get to watch children become parents, and parents become grandparents.
In the kind of way you can pop around and fold washing whilst drinking wine in dressing gowns, and then go away for the weekend together to a sweat lodge and dance naked under the full moon.
What, don’t you guys do this with your neighbours too? #MargsLyf
It has taken many seasons of watching women become mothers, cooking meals for friends in need, witnessing community evolve through many iterations of crisis (thanks Rona!), learning to find joy relating to all souls, not just the seemingly “aligned” ones, and the sacredness of consistent and committed Work in my own community, to feel truly rooted in this way. Including my involvement int the wider community. With the people I’ve chosen for my life and people I haven’t, but are part of it regardless.
I think that last sentence is a potent one to bring greater emphasis too.
I’ve come to understand an underrated necessity of this kind of diversity, acceptance and learning that comes from being with people, who are not just “your people”, in the chosen kind of way.
Truly seeing the value in and unconditionality of all people. Seeing people for who they truly are, and embracing them wholly, regardless of your own ways of being, and even including them as meaningful pillars in your life at times (not just seeing and valuing them “over there”) is a path to peace.
Wholeness does not reject or discriminate
Intimacy in community is an ongoing journey for me.
Because it doesn’t just rely on me alone.
It relies on the Others and their journey of intimacy too. Something I have no control over. Something I have to constantly surrender into.
I’ve always been fortunate enough to find beautiful friends wherever I’ve gone. Instantly and deeply.
I’ve held onto most of these relationships, but truthfully I’m a terrible long distant friend.
Y’all long distance friends reading this - I know you know.
I am not promising I’ll send that Christmas card back this year, but just know that I haven’t forgotten about it.
It has taken me time in one place for me to understand me, and others, in a way I couldn’t have with an ever-fresh backdrop of life. Or even simply with the backdrop of a completely different culture (yes, been there, experienced that). Honestly, the familiarity of my own culture was something I resisted for many years. But now it can also be my greatest ally for feeling held, when I lean into it.
It has also taken me sitting through the discomfort of winter and not running away to the sunshine to reach these realisations too. Understanding how we need all cycles and seasons for our growth and being. It is easy to live in an endless summer, where the sunshine feeds the leaves and fruits. But if we don’t allow the winter energy to permeate the roots, the tree will collapse from imbalance.
Our generation in almost every way, even in the most literal sense, is always trying to run away to the sunshine.
Acknowledges that I am currently on a road trip to the sunshine.
I’m also not going to sit here on some stage and pretend that my husband and I weren’t looking at land in Uruguay just last week.
There is an inherent level of adventure seeking in us still.
I’ve never denied myself of that.
But the point of differentiation from before to now, is that at this point in my life, I can enjoy those parts of me from a place of peace and rootedness within my Self and in a physical place too. I can remain the observer of my desires and impulses, not be them. Controlled and governed by them, in a way that I need to respond to their every beckoning call.
When we re-uprooted our life late last year, selling our house, we opened the door to the possibility of moving somewhere else.
A lot of people were leaving after 2 years of closed borders.
It actually felt like a mass exodus at one point.
We also naturally wondered if there was somewhere else out there for us. More XYZ and less XYZ? Perhaps somewhere more “dreamy” that matched up with our vision boards a bit more.
But the only message I have gotten since then is - Your community is here. There is no where else to go. Stop searching. Go deeper. Just be. You know how to do this.
So I actually redid my vision board to match the potency of my current reality, just so I wouldn’t forget just how beautiful it really is. And remind myself, my dream life is not beyond me, somewhere in the future. (I’ve added “more boating” to it now, but otherwise it’s still the same).
Staying was transformative.
Everyone that stayed looked at each other after everyone left. We recalibrated, feeling the holes left behind. We acknowledged each other for still being here. And then we deepened. We knitted, weaved and strengthened. We felt a new and real level of intimacy that we hadn’t felt before. It happened collectively. It was the permission we all needed to truly trust and show up for each other, like we would have in the old ways. But hadn’t yet been able to unlock in the last iteration of community.
And some times, most times, when I leave home now, like my experience earlier today, I am reminded of this. The missing and longing for this potency is real.
It’s true, that I don’t want to stat again, again… again.
Although I suspect one day we will choose to, again.
In the meantime, the power of intimate connection that comes from time, consistency and longevity in one place, is something I am learning to value deeply.
It has been an enormous gift to my heart and sense of inner peace.
Not just on an individual level, but in the necessity of the template that is required in these times. The merging of the Self with the Whole. Community.
Is the next step in our evolution.
Returning to the real life, I-can-touch-you, communities, economies, and ways of living.
Especially in spite of our transhumanistic trajectory.
As someone that accelerated as fast as possible through life (see my last post for reference), always trying to jump to the end goal that I often missed the sweetness of the journey, this lesson has been incredibly uncomfortable for me.
It has required me to go first when I didn’t want to. It has required me to show up in my deepest fears in front of others to truly allow myself to be seen. Over and over, through many iterations. It has required me to confront all the parts of myself holding me back. It has required that all my wounds of true intimacy and trust in the Other, be brought to the surface. It has taught me to surrender my hyper-independence and learn how to ask for help, support and allow myself to be truly held. It has required so much, and continues to require so much. These processes are non-linear.
But now when I think of my life, the quality of it can be found in the intimacy of my relationships and my community.
It can be found in the love I experience and share in.
Both with family and with community.
My sense of home is unequivocally connected to the Other, the Whole.
It is not simply something I find inside myself, or something that I find on my own.
It is a reciprocation.
It is intimacy.
It is trust.
It is familiarity.
It is life lived.
It is sacred work.
It is time and seasons.
It is shared.
It is beyond me, my Self.
It doesn’t have an easy title.
I’ve written over 6,000 words and 16 pages in this post (thank you for sticking with me here) trying to capture the simplicity and the complexity of these swirling thoughts about my journey over the last decade, landing.
And I feel like there are about 6,000 more words that want to pour out of me.
How can one be succinct when you’re “in” something? There is still so much to explore. The lessons learned, the takeaways, can’t be as easily expressed in the punchy or reductionist ways that hindsight provides.
I usually like to create a title before I start writing.
I usually know, to a certain degree, what I want to say. A download comes hard and fast. A title gives me clarity and focus and a thread to weave, so the story remains somewhat coherent. The title might change later, but usually I start with something.
I couldn’t find a title today.
I started with nothing. Except the urge, “Write. Return to home. Go”.
When I release all that I’ve mused so far and I think to the future and the notion of Home; Going forward I know that I am feeling called to accept the idea that “I’m home” and to no longer be distracted or influenced by external forces pulling me otherwise.
I’m committed to the many years ahead, like I am in my own marriage.
I’m grateful to know that I’ve (finally) planted strong seeds with strong roots, and that I will grow an even stronger tree from them.
My soul is aroused by the intimacy of the connection I’m deepening into more and more each day.
I’m at peace to not need more than I have, or be anywhere other than where I am.
I’m happy that my children know their place in the world.
I have one final reflection tonight —
The other night I shared in a Choir performance as part of a Fundraiser for a local environmental cause, at the local Hotel. At one moment during the event, I looked around at all the people around me, both in my Choir group and the audience, the joy, the connection, the trust, the generations, the unity and togetherness. The community. I was overflowing with gratitude that this was my life. These were my people. This was my home.
It wasn’t just that we were all there together united in song and place and a shared vision. Which is damn powerful in its own right.
But it was also the fact every person there had their own story. Their own joys and sorrows. Their own life. Their own richness. And over the years, I had been so privileged to intimately share and witness insight into so many people’s different lives and souls, standing in that single room. Oomph.
There was such truth in realising the moment I was experiencing was so far deeper than just the moment I was experiencing.
It was truly an honour.
We were many. And we were one.
I felt a knowing
I believe this sense of simply belonging in my community, being part of the Whole, in a real-life, real-human-to-human, real-feeling-the-earth-beneath-your-feet, real-family-despite-everything, longevity and deep acceptance kind of way, is really the gravity point of where my journey “home” has landed me. Thus far, anyway.
I will enjoy reflecting on this post in another decade, like I did wit my travel blog 11 years ago, to see how far I’ve come. But when I look back to what I wrote then, honestly, I think already knew all that I know now. It was just time to live it.
Think global, act local.
Think wholly, act locally.
Perhaps it really has been as simple (and yet as complex) as that all along.