I wrote the piece below a while back.
Finding it again this morning reminds me that what I write, and the ways I chose to write, reflects where I was at the time of that writing, and where I am today.
From a little while back then…
Yesterday I was on a train coming home to the London house that I live in having been away visiting friends and family in the North East of England. I lived there for 40 plus years, and I have lived here for 18 months.
As I dozed off on the train, waking now and again, half noticing the spaces between where I had been and where I was going, the rhythm of the train kept offering word patterns around coming home, going home, being at home, with prompts around being homeless.
Where am I at home, where are you at home?
In the city where I grew up, which is neither where I live now, or where I had been visiting, that person I was there and then, is that the same person that I am now, decades later?
The book Always Coming Home by Ursula K. Le Guin has been floating around with me for the last year or so, and it offers me all sorts of feelings about where in myself I am at home, or just… home.
Make yourself at home, my home is your home, our home, our city, our town, village, hamlet… our planet.
Can we make ourselves at home here?
Owning my home, here, as in my sense of the space within my body, this space I can access when I need to, or choose to, this space where I can sense a slowing down of the systems that support me.
The slowing down of my breathing, my heart beat, my thoughts.
As these physical systems slow, soften, relax and settle, my emotions settle too.
And, after a few minutes other emotions find space and attention as they show up in ways beyond words.
Maybe not beyond, but as senses, shapes, textures and rhythms.
Absorbing this landing here, back in the space that houses me, this physical structure, noticing the pace and the pulse of the way my emotional energies show up, and offer a way of being that is about where I am, and has less to do with geography and more to do with being a being, being here, with me, at home in myself, an inner smile forms, like shapes do in a cloud when I give time to notice.
In the work that I have done with others, it seems that the modern constant consumer based experiment so often strips us of our understanding of the true sense of feeling at home.
Our birth and life may offer all sorts of opportunities, to experience ourself, and how interactions with others, humans and more, can make us rich and capable of so many beautiful engagements, and these possibilities of other, different ways of organising and managing self, family, community, flow and move me towards questioning these modern cultural norms that feel anything but normal.
I recognise that I can choose to use this shift, that felt sense, when I slow down and allow life to find me as I am… rather than as I am told I should be… other ways of making change arise, ways that involve becoming able to sit with facts such as… there is much damage and pain that arises from systems of power, control, dominance… meanwhile, these other ways of change are not based upon ownership of people and property as a primary need.
My experience of the current modern cultural norms, leads me towards these other ways of change, for me and our species, and may show up in the ways I manage my own internal conversations, the ways that I know myself, the ways that I manage the conversations I have with others, the ways that others know me and the choices I make about how I respond to the offers of connection and community, internally and externally, with myself and with others.
I am feeling a bit lost here, maybe you are too, it’s a winding path I’m walking, where was this going when it showed up for me this morning, oh yeah, home, coming home and the book by Ursula, always coming home.
Maybe this journey that our species has been on, is offering us new perspectives, that tap into older perspectives, that offer ways of feeling secure and at home, and this morning as I contemplate the spaces and people that I feel close connections with, wherever I know them from, I am offered ways of always finding my way home, here to me, sharing myself and my home with them and you.
Thankfully, I meet people wherever I go who are challenging the current extractive and dominance systems, and it is easy to get tied up in how we do this while losing sight of what we want, how we want to live in ourselves and in community and close connection with each other.
Maybe we are coming home, home to a relationship with our regenerative planet that can be generous and caring, and this home planet is offering me, and you, a model of how to live and love and offer wonderful futures to those who arrive long after we have gone.
Thanks to all of you who take time to question the ways we are told we should be, and make those moves towards creating a safe and loving home within yourself and your communities.
It is both a task and gift to do this work, and my experience is that it pays well and make us all rich.