As the first harvest arrives and the rains cool the evenings and the swallows fly in flocks like schools of fish above the fields, I return home to my apartment and open my senses to how the place has changed in the month I was away. Having moved here not very long ago and been gone most of the last three months, I am feeling even more unmoored than usual. A creature of the liminal spaces, I notice the nagging question, with me since childhood, raise its monstrous head and look me square in the eyes: Where is home?
Image: Baltic Sea, Latvia
A thousand questions resound from my own heart in response to this one’s gaze boring into the deepest secret corners of my heart, where I try to hide from this question that continually torments me. Do I have to choose between the woman I love and the land that I love? Do I have to choose between where I come alive and where I live? Do I have to choose between the place where indigenous and coloniser live side by side, the descendants of slaves and the masters or the land where the colonisation was so long ago, there is only modernity? Do I have to choose the place where the wolves have been killed and occassionally re-introduced or where they have been killed and have chosen to return? Why, after 13 years in this country, do I not feel at home? Why am I not embedded in community? Why have I not found people who are like me? Have I potentially found them now? Are there folks here where I live, where the wolves live, that could become community? Shall I speak English for work, or German? Where are my friends? Where do I belong? Where is Earth’s Desire for me? Why do I feel so damn alive and enlivened and pulsing with Eros when I am in the red rock country of the four corners in the southwest? What happens when I return here? Why do I return here? Is it only my human relationship? Am I living more in the liminal virtual sphere of zoom than in reality? How do I embody and fully arrive in my life wherever I am? How do I come home if I still don’t know where home is? Is home where I am, wherever I am?
And none of them can be answered. I am left then, empty of thinking and sit in the vast loneliness and longing of “I don’t know”. Not-knowing is to part of me quite terrifying, bringing me to the brink of ancient existential threat. To my wholeness, it is a state of being in the aliveness of now, the emergent experience of life unfolding. It is a humbling, a bringing me to this ground, here, und my feet. It is the home of this moment and I still long for a home, a place to grow roots and from which I can journey from and return to. Earth, where is your desire for me?
Addendum:
Earth responds through my holographic heart deep knowing...
My deepest commitment and vision is to Mystery, the Holy, Earth’s Dreaming and specifically the ritual journey of the Soul Initiation of Humans and collectively the Great Dying that is afoot. I am a Death Doula for the too small way of life - individual souls and species and current ways of being that we call modernity. This is my worldview and within that to whom I am in surrender and service. I am not in service to any particular organizations in and of themselves, or even any countries or identities, rather, I listen for places that Earth's Dreaming calls me to be the one I am and offer the gifts I carry. Within those places- organisational, physical, imaginal- I am truly a troubadour, a nomadic storyteller, a bard and ritualist. I am a hologram and I travel the hologram, the web of life. I am a healer that travels from place to place, offering poison to hasten the dying and catalyse the transformation that is possible. I do not have only one idealogical house, one house of work, one physical home.
Who I am is a traveler. This is true in all levels of my life experience. The yearning for one home only makes suffering of lack and scarcity, longing of the sort that makes me small and miserable and actually prevents me from fully expressing myself as I am. I am home in my own heart and on the earth I currently stand. I have developed practices and ways of being that are meant to travel, meant to be carried. That are not dependent on being rooted in one place. Traveling to others to guide, teach, tell stories etc. My home is my heart and the earth under my feet. The question is, how to be in deep relationship within the dance of the two - my holographic heart and this place that I am, so that I can thrive and deeply participate in Earth's Dreaming and share a circle of loving humans and other than humans in community.