[Reflections on home]
The concept of “home” has always intrigued me. During the past month, I’ve experienced a brilliant collision of presence and home, and I’ve found that one catalyzes the other. Let me explain.
In high school, I believed home was this allusive place. I called it Elsewhere. During college, home felt halfway between Chapel Hill and Boone until I met my best friends. It was then that I learned it could be transitory. It’s not a new idea– you’ve been familiar with the sappy phrase “you’re my home” since you started reading romance novels. In one way or another, the concept of a person being the embodiment of home has drifted through your head before. It might even feel more natural than walls and a roof.
I want to start by saying I’ve never felt particularly comfortable in my human body, on this human-populated earth. I think this is the condition of the majority of us, especially women. Our physical form is never quite right; we could always be more. We’re anxious and depressed and hungry for anything that offers escape. Some of us are so uncomfortable here that we stop trying. We hibernate, isolate, and eventually leave the earth having never felt at home. If we can’t even find comfort within ourselves, how do we expect other people to fill the home-hole?
In short, I think we have it all wrong. It’s the human imperative to desire belonging– to fit in and be loved. This comes from a place of ego. We want to feel worthy of these things because we haven’t learned to generate self-worth internally. We want to fit in because we have yet to accept ourselves, because we want other people to do it for us. But what happens when you strip away external validation? Is there anything left?
Our problem, I believe, is that we have become too stuck in our perception of reality. Somewhere in-between the second and the fourth dimensions, where everything boils down to vibration, we forget the vastness of ourselves. We don’t see our light or our inherent value because we are too preoccupied with how other people perceive these things in us. It is fear that guards the entrance to our true home – the place of pure love.
Recently I have experienced an abundance of gratitude. In a miraculous landslide of events, I found a job and a place to live that isn’t my parents’ basement. After months of mediation, prayer, manifestation, and faith, everything came together at once. I had been denied from hundreds of positions in various cities across the country and was becoming exhausted and impatient with the process. Then, this miracle occurred. Within a weekend, I had full-time employment and an incredible apartment within walking distance to work. It couldn’t be more perfect, and it wouldn’t have happened if I had not upheld my faith in the process.
The radiant, loving energy I felt from the universe kept me buoyant and guided me forward, and in mirroring this energy, it was extended and amplified. Constructive interference is a term that refers to the event in which two waves [of light, sound, etc] combine to form a much larger, more powerful wave. I believe the same concept applies to energy and the way in which reality manifests; as we emit positive energy, it attracts like energy and results in constructive interference. The love you produce catalyzes more love in your life, and so on. As you begin to discover home within yourself, you emit a knowledge of belonging that eventually reverberates back.
Truthfully, I didn’t expect to land in my hometown after graduation, but now I have no doubt that this is exactly where I am meant to be at this time. Every morning, I make coffee and open the windows and am overcome with a swell of gratitude for what is.
If I wasn’t in my hometown at the moment – if I had failed to follow my intuition – I wouldn’t have been present through my mother’s recovery after major surgery. Now, I can drive her to rehab. As she heals, we pass the hours with Christmas movies and popcorn and art, and peace seals the space between us. If I wasn’t in my hometown, I also wouldn’t have reconnected with old friends. So many conversations have given me the exact strength I needed in the moment. Perhaps I wouldn’t be learning to love the cold, even when it pricks your lungs, frosting you from the inside. But I’m here. And I am discovering the beauty that comes from trusting something greater than yourself.
It’s important to recognize that the difficult months had their own value. Relationships healed and fell apart. I learned so much about myself and others. I stopped trying to control the trajectory of my life, and more doors began to open. If I had stuck with my plan, I would be broke, lonely, and halfway across the country. Instead, I am learning that meeting the universe with love and trust, even through the difficult times, creates the space in your life for miracles.
Still, I could tell you this town is my home, but that would be false. I would rather tell you that I’ve never felt so at home in my life, and it has very little to do with my physical location.
Lately, when I meditate, warm honey spreads through my vascular system. It feels like a buzzing golden light, and it whispers, “I am home.” The “I” is not me, it comes from a place that isn’t my own mind. I often wonder if it is God or my soul, or if God and my soul and the “I am” that is Siena are all part of the same thing. I don’t even have a fraction of the answers. What I do know is that my conceptualization of “home” has shifted from something rooted in place and people to something of a much larger scale. I feel my own self expanding through the stratosphere. Every aspect of this self feels settled and peaceful, even though it’s not rooted in form or physical reality.
It reminds me of the Miltonian idea in Paradise Lost that we all exist on a continuum of light. The detritus under your feet is connected to every form of life, and every form of life is connected to a higher energy. Milton calls this God. To me, the continuum only appears hierarchical because of a difference in vibrational energy from one level to the next. If we think of God as the height of loving energy, and thus our true home, then we also must learn to recognize God in all parts of the continuum. There is love in the fabric of our bones.
This, I think, is the secret to feeling at home on earth.
It’s not your family or romantic partner or childhood house. It’s an energy that exists within you, that you can harness at any time. It is the state of peace and love, and the recognition of these in other beings. It is the choice to see the home rather than the hell in all things.
That includes yourself. Myself.
With love,
Siena
Presently 