This is Home

where I belong

Let’s talk about home. Or better yet —let’s sing about home.

“The home is the heart’s tent.” — Lebanese proverb

“Home is not where you live but where your ancestors speak.” — Lakota

“Home is where the heart is.” — English proverb

“There’s no place like home.” — The Wizard of Oz

Ever leave yourself, only to return and no longer recognize who you were?

Ever go back to a place once called home —familiar, but no longer yours?
Ever long for a home, so deep, that you could only find it in the reflection of a lake, deeper than dreams?
Ever feel as though you are an orphan or outcast? Exiled from home? Looking at home from the outside, looking in?
Ever realize that no matter where you are, home is exactly smack dab in the middle of your center.

This writing is in honor of home —physical, emotional, visionary, mythic, rooted, driftwood, shells, nest. Motherland.

“Home is not where you’re coming from—it’s where you’re going.” — Hawaiian teaching

“Your home is where you are understood.” — African-American folk wisdom

Art: Catrin Well Stein

Home. Place. Roots. Location.

A turtle carrying its own house. Hermit crabs, migrating to new shells.

Monarchs, endlessly traversing north to south and back again.

Is home a cocoon of one’s own becoming?

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Before I go any further:

Thank you.

Thank you for reading me, for walking this spiral with me. Your presence supports my unfolding as a writer, storyteller, and facilitator of writes of passage. I don’t take it for granted.

I also want to apologize for the lapse in writing. I’ve just returned from a visit to the place I once called home: the Northwoods. Westernmost Upper Michigan. The land where I lived from age 9 to 17. It had been ten years since I last stood on that ground.

I no longer refer to it as home, not exactly. And yet—it holds some of my ancestor memories and bones. The more recent ones. The ones I ate and laughed and danced and played cards with. The Italian bakery where my grandfather and his father baked bread in the 120-year-old oven still stands.

So does my mother’s house, layered with ancestral objects: watches, prayer books in German and Latin, lace, linens, old photographs.

There are stories pressed into every drawer. Ghosts in the floorboards. Memory in the scent of flour, the clink of silverware, the shape of doorways I once ducked under.

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In so many fairytales, the story begins with leaving home.

The girl is sent into the woods with a task. A foolish boy takes up an adventure, grabs his horse, and gallops off.

Sometimes home is warm, but fate calls him away.

Sometimes home is unkind, and she leaves to survive.

Either way, they must pass through the wild to meet themselves. They must accomplish tasks, or fulfill a strange destiny. They must travel beyond home. Enter mystery. Step towards the adventure and work their way through it.

Only then can they truly return.

And when they do—they are no longer the same.

They re-enter as one who has seen strange lands, survived dark forests, received riddles and ruin and gifts.

They come home transformed.

Image: Mossling

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There was something like that for me, this time.

The cemetery—colorful, well-tended, alive with flowers and trinkets—sang stories I had forgotten. You can tell a lot about a town by how it tends its dead. I may have many critiques of the place I came from, but I love how they remember.

As my daughter and I visited graves and sang to our ancestors in their language (not ours), I felt a strange kind of bridging. My daughter, too, carries their songs in her belly.

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Home is a funny thing.

You can huff and puff and blow it down if it’s not well-built.

A house is a home, yes—but home is also a sense of belonging.

To place. To people. To self.

To the body. To the house that is this body—this temple of remembering and forgetting. Home might also be a cathedral of bending birch and tall tall pines.
Of simply, a song of remembering.

This is home, where I belong
in this heart, in this breath
this is home, where I belong
in this voice, in this song

In one of my favorite stories, the girl never returns home. She simply runs to the edge of the forest, from a wild wolf of forgetting. Naked. Over hand held white sheets to cross a roaring, rushing river. Where then does she go next? What is home for her?

In another beloved story, a woman leaves her married home, only to try and return to a childhood home -to her people, her village, her roots. But the shifting of shapes has occurred in her . Home shifts. Her stories shift. Her body shape shifts. She becomes a different story, a story that no longer fits in the same way, in the old ways. And so she runs into the story of her own homecoming, impregnating the sky with a constellation of stars.

Art: Alexandra Dvornikova

In a third beloved story, a woman leaves home to merge with a natural world. She marries a puckWiggins, the Ojibwe version of kontomble. It seeds trilliums into her marrow. The lake, that is an inland sea takes up residency in her womb. She breathes every particulate of place through the ecosystem that is her body. Waves, moving through her eyes, squeezing tears upon the soil to bloom bleeding hearts in spring.

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Full Moon in Capricorn. Cancer Season.

A season of ancestry, roots, memory, the body as home.

So I ask you:

What is home to you?

Where is home for you now?

What does it smell like? Taste like? Feel like?

What have you left behind—and what still lives there, waiting?

Write me back, if you’d like. I’d love to hear.

I offer you some writing prompts for the season. And a just post full moon ritual —(we have three sparkly days when the Moon is full or new, to do our moon rituals) on behalf of home -the home in you -the question of place -the root of your longing -the shape of your shifting -the yes of your becoming. Releasing the shell of the outworn. Returning to the altar of the body.

Before you Continue to the next section - A BIG ANNOUNCEMENT! Rewilding the Word is accepting applications! I have 8 spots remaining. Please consider this deep, rich, cornucopia of creativity, writes of passage -mythopoetic mystery school of story and self —and the slow food nourishment of rewilding words —in the temple of your body, the embodiment of your voice, the fire of your story —with the caduceus of your pen, with the transformation of your becoming. Write the world inside out -change your world with words.