Home (?)

The beginning of this month i moved for the eighteenth time since 2017. Friends, 18! Yes, freaking 18 times.

it’s colder than i’m used to up North!

And i am ready to completely rewrite this story. The ancestral echos of displacement and survival. And how my life choices reflected my loyalty to this story in an effort to BELONG.

Some of my moves spanned continents, some blocks, states and counties, but one was not easier than the other.

I collapsed into a puddle of tears and exhaustion as i went to sleep for the last night in the home that held me in my most vulnerable times. I sweated as i hurled boxes and wrapped crystals and candles in bubble wrap. I burst with pain and exhaustion and gratitude as i went to each room in the house and thanked the space for all it held for me. My heart bled as i looked around at the utter mountain of shit I’ve accumulated and the pain of leaving my home.

and in that brokenness i declared

I am done. Done. Done.

Enough!!!!

I crave home

I crave stability

I crave rest

Enough!

Every place I’ve lived, every roof over four walls i have dwelled in, i attempted to create a feeling. By buying pretty objects, by arranging cosy things in pleasing aesthetic ways and accumulating items that created a sense of home.

My move from Israel to the States in September 2020

The first time i moved across the ocean i had five bulging suitcases. Oversized and overweight. My move across the ocean a second time had me with only three. And in the five years I’ve lived on this side of the pond i have accumulated a disgusting amount of stuff.

Yes, disgusting.

Thats how it felt when i was packing up my four story farm house full of my beautiful belongings and started listing it all on facebook marketplace like a crazy person.

It felt disgusting and I had the insistent urge to purge it all.

So the past month i found myself crying, purging and donating half my closet and selling furniture for twenty bucks a piece. I just wanted everything gone. Gone out of sight. And every time a random stranger came to pick up something with big smiles, because they just scored deallllls, i felt a deeper breath. A lighter countenance.

And i dont think ‘things’ are bad or wrong. Honestly, it just is.

But let me be real here. I’m just tired. Tired of having things. Tired of having to take care of things. Tired of carrying so much. Too much. And with this move, i am not just putting down my physical things and walking more free and light, i am also putting down much of the emotional weight I’ve been carrying on my shoulders. The weight of tending to my herd, feeding them and myself, keeping a roof over our heads, tending to a four story house that only me and my small dog occupied, and the weight of rebuilding my life again.

So in this ocean of boxes, tape and bubble wrap, i was in a purge of all sorts. Mostly a purge of my attachments to my things, but also to my belief and understanding of what HOME is and what it’s supposed to be.

My little car filled with plants, feathers, drums and singing bowls, the only stuff that i looked at and said, huh this is actually me, and smiled.

On my one hour drive to our new space, i drove in silence in stark awareness of the pure transition taking place, noticing the weather change as i headed into the mountains, the quieter country roads and the endless nostalgia and pain and grief and excitement and all of it. It made me search for the definition of home, the meaning of home, maybe the feeling of home.

I searched in myself for an anchor. A time i felt home. Maybe just a moment in time. Maybe a place. A memory, something???

I contemplated if it’s in the body? The seat of the self? Or is that the ego? Or is it the seat of the soul? What is it?

The drive was an existential winding journey to an unknown beginning. Home ? Maybe. But not for sure.

The journey has been long. This year plucked everything i knew. It was a nine year, a year of completion, endings and transformation, and also the year of the snake. My personal shedding.

Yes, it plucked my ‘home’. The comfort of the insanity I felt most home in. But it also is the year i stopped negotiating with others’ shadows and chose myself.

Yes, it plucked my perceived sense of safety, but it’s also the year I chose self worth over dying chaotic relationships.

Yes, i may have had to move through divorce and physical moves and all that comes with, but I learned that i can be both wounded and wise.

In the shedding, I became increasingly tired of holding it all, and even more tired of handing over my power to people outside of myself. I learned in my journey that healing didn’t and won’t make me perfect, it made me and continues to make me real and authentic.

In the absence of ‘home’ and stability, i finally allowed myself to get naked and vulnerable, to let myself be seen and heard.

In the utter instability and seeming chaos, I found my tender strength. Just as the phoenix rises. Yes, the myth and legend.

With this many transitions and the unbelievable instability, maybe I’ve hit a new baseline. And maybe that baseline is an internal HOME.

Something that nobody can take away from me. Something that exists inside of me, something i built brick by brick, prayer by prayer. No matter what has come i can surf. I can ride the wave. I am okay. Through my utter self respect and devotion, I built a feeling of safety in my nervous system that belongs to me and gives me the absolute internal knowing and truth of what i am a yes for, and what i am a no for.

With that emerged an internal trust that will never allow me to betray myself again.

Because i am regulated. Because i have a castle inside of me that I am the queen of. I built it.

I reclaim what was always me. Home is me. I am home. It is not outside of me. And i will never seek it in another, because there is no void to fill anymore.

I am where i am because my prayers have been answered.

And although i am still landing in this transition, i can count on the horses to keep me grounded and standing at the fence at 7:56 every morning trusting that i will show in three minutes to feed them. I can count on nature and the peace it brings me. I can count on the silence of a snow covered forest and a bright full moon night. I can count on my devotion to my meditation and prayer, i can count on my internal resources. I can count on myself.

Now that’s HOME.