Winter Solstice 2024
I sit here with the Catalina Mountains in the distance, in Tucson Arizona, and I imagine the cactus and the mesquite trees and the roadrunners and coyotes with me as I write to you. My beloved and I have been traveling for the last two and a half months in the Southwest of the USA, asking the question, “might this be home?” Do you want us here, Earth? We ask the bees, Is this a place where we might have a garden for you? We ask the field of possibilities, could this be a place for community, where we might give our gifts and be nourished by friends and make-family? We drive, we visit my friends, we listen. No place has grabbed hold of our hearts yet. On Sunday, we will drive to Santa Fe, where I lived for 10 years, the only place that has felt like home. We pilgrimage with these questions, we learn to make offerings and prayers that are soft nests of welcome for our longing for home. Then, we will drive to my parents house for the holidays - thousands of miles away, the place I grew up, but which does not feel like home.
I’ve written about this before, my life long and perennial search for home. I am on the pilgrimage of my own longing, making home in my own body- recognizing how little I take care of my physical body, especially when I am traveling. I notice, with surprise, that although I have been longing for home, I do not deeply believe I could belong, or that I will be welcome. I tend these parts who are so scared and so alone, I hold them and heal my fear and make my own welcome in my heart. I pray to not only the dark goddesses of transformation and winter and death, but cultivate relationship with the goddesses of home. I make offerings to the bees and ask for them to show us the way. I mark my calendar for the full moon, Friday the 13th, just before Solstice, promising to enter into ritual and make offerings and prayers for Home. And each day, I listen for the echo, to be claimed or called, for my ancestor’s guidance and the aliveness in my own heart. I learn about places for pilgrimage and ceremony and places for home and the rituals of garden and hearth. I call to the mountains and the waters to call us home.
And I turn towards my “work” in the world and my Soul’s home in the Ecology of the mythic world; my storytelling, my Death Doula for the Great Dying work, my guiding and mentoring of folks on the soul journey. I recognize myself as a liminal being, an edge dweller, a nomad of sorts, one who is not easily fit into the roles of society. The “home archetype” of the witch of the woods, the walker between worlds, the nomadic storyteller, the wild hermit. How do I hold both of these longings, needs and homes, paradoxically together, in my heart? That is my practice at the moment, yes to the paradox, to the tension, to the not-knowing, to the journey… May the mountains recognize me and may I be a hollow bone for Earth’s dreaming. May my voice, my body, my presence, be nourishment, death doula support and healing in these times.
Images of the Cochise Stronghold, the place where the Chiricahua Apache, led by Cochise, fought the US Army for 9 years, at the end of which they received, then had taken away roughly 3,000,000 sq. miles of land. In these hills are springs, caves, paintings, stories, memories of humans living beautifully with the land. I was here over my birthday, honoring those who found home in these hills and valleys and whose home was not only made of land, but language, wild foods, culture, ceremony and sacred knowledge. This deep ache of not growing up in an Earth-centered and Earth honoring culture is bone deep. It is the reason I am dedicated to re-membering the ancient ways of my ancestors, as well as living with Earth-centric lifeways, in ritual reciprocal relationship with the place, other than humans and more than humans where I live. Why I ache for a home to love and be loved by. And it is the heart of all of my work. Not to say that I am always successful! I forget every single day, hundreds of times. but it is this ache that reminds me, re-members me back into the web of Life. The blessing in the curse. May we remember, may we all find home, may we tend to the land and to each other in these rough times of change.
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