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30-Mar
It’s been a while since I last wrote for this blog. I’ve missed it, as it is a place of belonging for me. And it’s about the concept of arriving home, of belonging, that I want to write about today. I didn’t write for so long as I needed to distance myself from words and the mental and physical clutter that accompanied the end of last year for me, where time seemed to accelerate and I couldn’t find a break to connect with my voice anymore. I wanted to come back to this space from a place of unity and coherence. So here goes.
I never knew I had a home. I have been looking for a home all my life. It didn’t help that I’ve lived a nomadic (though wonderful) life since I was a small child, not staying for too long in any one place, saying goodbye on a regular basis to budding friendships, not spending much time watering life or watching connections grow. I was very young as I said goodbye to my birth country, only to view it from a distance through the decades, always wondering what my life would have been like, had I remained ‘one of them’.
I was looking for a home outside myself, a physical space that would contain me, that would reassure me that I have a place in life, a house with portraits of real people and stories seeping from its walls. I didn’t know until very recently that my home is as immense, as vast and as limitless as I now know it to be. And I have stopped searching.
Certainly, belonging is having significance in others’ lives, and being reassured of this through love and connection. I know this because I travelled all the way to the other South this past December with a very concrete mission: to reencounter my ‘tribe’. I wanted to express my desire for belonging to this wonderful group of people strewn across three countries, and I needed to know that they welcomed me. The generational renewal was also calling for new friendships to re-emerge, as the older generation is slowly abandoning its protagonism and new souls are arriving into the family… I now consciously carry, deep down in my cells, our shared ancestry, our DNA, our common idiosyncrasy. I now feel the responsibility to keep telling our story, to keep remembering to dig deeper into our common roots, to continue expressing our inherent joy.
Life certainly has a way of showing us our direction. But life has also a way of showing us all the different possible distractions and diversions we might follow. We go on expeditions, sometimes to find, sometimes to lose ourselves. We spend energy trying to control the threatening effects of our own darkness, with the fear that we might disappear when facing our truths inside.
But all the while, there is a river running deep beneath the noise. That river never loses its direction, it flows purposefully onward, carrying it all, knowing. Our soul is like that river. No matter how far we travel in our quest to find what we are looking for, the answer was there all along, beneath.
We are the container of light and dark, we are capable of holding everything. Our minds and our disjointed connection to our bodies may take us away from that understanding that we are it all. And that was my journey, until quite recently. I have now finally arrived home, and from now on the only compass I need is the one I was born with.
