Finding Home: journeying back to ourselves
There is something about this time of year that always tugs at my soul.
When I left Alaska back in 2016 I knew that late August into early September would always make my heart ache for my first home.
There’s something that’s a mix of magic and poignancy about the way the tundra begins to turn cranberry and the leaves go from verdant green to an olive that foreshadows the yellow to gold to bronze soon to come.
After a summer of high light living in the land of the midnight sun, the sun begins to dip in the sky earlier making you appreciate the gift of light.
There is a certain scent that wafts in on the breeze that reminds one - autumn is coming, as the polka dotted, Super Mario-like mushrooms bloom in the woods, and you want to grab the last days of summer and revel in them while you can.
Do we ever lose what once was home in our heart no matter how far we travel in life?
I don’t think so, and perhaps this is the part of ourselves that not only yearns for simpler days but feels the need to travel back to the past to re-anchor into the roots of who we once were.
So we can remember - with bittersweet vividness- who we’ve been, how we’ve become, and the journey we’ve taken to travel where we are.
There is a see-saw like balance of going back and forth from one end to the other, when it comes to remembering, learning from, and honoring the past while still allowing ourselves to embrace the gift of presence, reinvent ourselves in the present, and grow in new ways.
I often find that my psyche likes to zig zag back to the past - going through a very soulful, in-depth process of understanding who I was at different points in my life - just before it’s getting ready to quantum leap forward in the immediate future.
This is the invisible process of the soul who intuitively knows we need to remember, honor and grieve our former self in order to embrace and welcome the birth of who we’re becoming.
This is also a process that can feel psychologically uncomfortable, because when our sense of self is shifting, our identity feels less certain, and we can struggle to find emotional equilibrium.
We find ourselves searching through the pages of our past in order to retrieve bits and pieces of our soul, discovering where we might have lost a piece of ourselves, so we can heal any lingering grief or trauma that we couldn’t fully access in the moment.
As we do this, we can appreciate our journey, witness the growth, and gather our energy back into us so we can move forward with more freedom, presence and clarity in our heart.
So we can move away from any places in our psyche where we still have an attachment to pain, fear, or shame, and we can learn to see ourselves through a greater lens of wholeness and find the grace to look at our journey through a lens of appreciation and love.
We forget ourselves in the fluidity of our humanity only to find ourselves in the divinity of remembering that if we can find the love in any lostness, we can always find our way home.
Writing that makes me remember a line I once wrote in June of 2018 and later included in Revelations of The Sky.
At the time, we had found out our precious dog named Samwise had cancer and didn’t have much time to live, and my heart was pulled into the painful dance of grief and love.
I kept remembering, the beautiful memories we’d made in our home in Alaska, as I struggled with a feeling of displacement on Kauai - we’d been here a little under a year and it wasn’t going as planned.
I struggled with wanting to crawl back into memories of Sam, and what felt like golden years and a time where life felt more joyful, comfortable and known.
We were a party of five. Two humans. Two fluffy white dogs. And one calico cat. Our very own good vibe tribe, and I didn’t want the party to end.
Some part of me wanted to go back to that simpler time, even as a much wiser part of me knew that we can’t go back.
I knew that I needed to feel and work through my grief to make peace with the present, so I could embrace the gift of presence and my journey on the island.
Writing helped. It’s always been my way of not only processing my feelings but writing the story of who I want to become and setting my heart compass in the direction of the way I’d like to grow.
And I knew I ultimately needed to find a way to grow forwards in faith, courage and expansion and not contract back into the past of how things once were, so I wrote the following words with conviction and intention.
Certain spaces and places anchor and orient us across our timeline. Sometimes we can keep revisiting those old spaces and sometimes life has a way of moving us along and inviting us into new spaces.
Change is inevitable on a beautiful planet fraught with creativity. And as somebody who has seen a lot of change these last few years, the best I can figure- since you can't take it with you- is that you can pour what you've loved best into your heart, so it becomes a part of you.
That way no matter where life moves you and where your soles take you, you can always go within and find home.
Home looks different now than it did then when I wrote those words.
We bought a house and moved last June to the town of Kilauea and are in the process of filling the space with laughter and life and creating new memories of love.
We still have a fluffy white dog - he’s a bit older now and there’s bittersweet feels attached to watching him age, but I am so grateful for how long he’s been with us on our journey. The calico cat is still with us too, sitting on the arm of our big blue couch as I write these words.
And I like to think Spirit Sam had a hand in this next part, because life gifted us with with a completely unexpected new friend around this time last year - an Irish Wolfhound named Rosie Cotton who I believe was searching for the perfect family to belong to and managed to manifest us on a September day of total serendipity.
But that is a story for another day…
For today I’m remembering with poignancy, I’m reflecting on growth and loss and the passage of time, and I keep staring out at the rainy skies as one line keeps running through my mind, over and over again, while my heart swells in expansion.
Thank you for all the love.
If you enjoyed this post you might also enjoy Let It Be Messy or The Red Paint of Reinvention.
Going through transition and looking for healing guidance for your journey at this time? You can find out more about my individual sessions here and book a complimentary discovery session.