In search of home.

How do we find our sense of place?

I love the fall, and I am usually excited by its arrival. But this year I feel an overwhelming grief. A gnawing I can’t satiate for an intangible — maybe idealized — sense of home. That deep feeling of closeness you get when you know that you belong… to the land…to a people. Being totally enveloped in “rightness”. As in, I am right, here. I am where my heart belongs. 

It’s an angsty kind of pain that accompanies longing for something that feels out of reach. As a nomadic kid, with nomadic ancestry, I’ve always been caught in the middle. Somewhere between what was and what is about-to-be. I became quite practiced in how to conjure a sense of home, even when I was far from it.

I was born in Buffalo, where I lived until I was eight. My parents were born and raised there. They had deep roots. The smells of different neighborhoods I can recall even now. I felt like everything made sense there….more importantly I made sense there. After we moved to Connecticut, I no longer made sense. And for a long time, and in most places we lived, I did not fit. Those places failed to reflect back to me some intangible truth I held inside. In hindsight, I’ve tired to appreciate those spaces as serving a different purpose — like how a polished stone needs to encounter grit in order to shine.

I’ve begun to think that maybe our ability to feel at home is less about a point on a map, and more about how we feel in the places we inhabit. How they uniquely shape the way we see ourselves.

In this way we are like rivers. Water that shifts and changes as it makes its way out to sea. We both carve, and are carved by, the landscapes we traverse. And it is impossible to quantify the balance between the two. The energy of where we come from, and where we are going, beating with in us. Each one-side of the same heart. 

I’ve since rooted down in the Pacific North West. A place I deeply love, and yet feels like a vast mystery at the same time (probably a little bit why I love it). Being here has brought a depth to my spirit. It is helping me see that the motions of our lives serve a purpose. That the true essence of home is more fluid. A dance between the person and the places they’ve been along the way.

So perhaps, as the fall draws near, the longing I feel isn’t really about a set of static coordinates. What I’m really needing is an appreciation of life’s fluidity, and remembering that my rightness doesn’t exist in a place, but inside myself.