I don’t think I really understood what home was until now.
It took loss to open me up to it.
It took the loss of one of my most central and formative relationships.
It took immigrating to a different country, cultural context, and land.
It took deciding to heal deep trauma – ancestral, familial, maternal, paternal.
It took the loss of an innocence of my deep beliefs around safety, “good”, and how the world “should” be.
And so now I sit, contemplating what I’ve learned and integrated – the knowledge I now hold in my bones.
I sit in this liminal space of starting to pack up my house (the womb space I created 3 years ago when I moved in), about to move into another space – a space of transition and more unknown.
But grateful that I have a place to land.
Yesterday, I wrote a post called “What’s holding you?” where I explored this essence of what is truly holding us.
What truly holds us when all else falls away?
This in essence is how I found home – how I parsed out all of the externally based energetic ties from what is honest and true.
What’s left.
What’s left holding you when your home, your familiar, your known changes, dies, or moves on?
There is a deep part of us that is wired to reach for the external, the familiar, to feel safe, to feel at home.
In a world where the One True Thing is change and mystery, this becomes highly problematic.
It causes us to live with a sort of low grade, constant anxiety, which we try to manage through staying busy – creating a comfortable home, creating “safe” relationships, staying busy, getting ahead of our mind.
Anyone who has ever had their world fall apart knows – there is a special place there.
An honest place.
It may be dark and dingy or perhaps even numb and lifeless in the wells of a depression, but if we are connected to our true home, with patience, we emerge.
It doesn’t require hope, or faith, or trust.
It requires a sense of home.
Home is an unshakable belonging to ourselves.
It is this deep belonging that we understand our belonging to others, to the earth, to our brothers and sisters – human, creature, plant, mineral.
I’m not talking about some idealistic hippy kumbaya kind of way.
I mean cellular knowledge.
I mean the felt and known awareness of home in our DNA, in our blood, in our bones.
I mean our relationship to our primal aliveness – eros.
I mean tasting the blood of your finger you just cut while slicing cucumbers and tasting and knowing that your blood – those minerals and cells – are also the minerals in the soil, the trees, and the steak you ate for dinner last night.
I mean your soul being firmly rooted in the animal being you embody.
I felt called to articulate this because of a book I read recently. The author eloquently spoke about her own experience of home and two things clearly stood out to me:
- She is not talking about the immigrant experience and
- Her childhood home was a place of belonging
While I’m sure that her experience of home is valid to her, I felt it was lacking in a sense of depth of what home truly means.
Living in a place that is different from your familiar formative years will show you who you are.
For example, I used to thing that I was this super easy going person that was super adaptable and would have no problem living in a land I wasn’t born to.
I spent most of my life sleeping on the ground in bivys (basically a waterproof sleeping bag cover), and in tents in the mountains. I had no idea how much I would miss these subtle core bits of “home” until they were simply not there.
From familiar flavours and foods that just weren’t available when I had a period craving, to the awareness of the privilege I had in calling for emergency services and not questioning whether or not they would actually arrive.
Where I thought I had taken full self responsibility, I quickly began to see where the holes lay.
I began to see how easy it is to assume things when we’ve not lived the full experience of the thing.
Similarly to those of us who had complicated relationships with our family, those “happy family” holidays can leave us with a complicated sense of how to be in this world.
So what is home when it’s not the familiarity that you grew up with, the soil you were born on, the cultural context that raised you?
My path to finding home was also the path to my healing – my physical body, intergenerational trauma, healthy nervous system regulation and restoration.
The deeper I can sit in my own knowing of home – in my bones – the deeper I can not only hold myself, but allow others to hold me.