Homecoming
“Author Jan Richardson tells us we can’t return home by taking the same route we used when we departed.”
That quote makes me want to ask: What route did I take when I departed, and which "home" are we talking about?
Naturally perhaps, my thoughts go first to my parents' house. The house where they live now is the one my family of origin moved into in 1984. Though it holds many memories, that is not my home and hasn't been for a long time now.
And the truth is that I have spent enough time departing. I will archive those stories until it's time for a different kind of retrospective.
Today, what I want is to write about the homecoming.
I think about what James Baldwin wrote in Giovanni's Room, about home being not a place, but an irrevocable condition. A state of being.
What state are you in? What state do you choose? These questions are what interest me now. What state do I want to associate with home, one I can carry with me no matter where life takes us next?
I am happy, peaceful, and relaxed every day, in every way. I repeat this affirmation to myself throughout the day. I feel shy sharing it here but it is also beautiful to release it into the world, to let kind eyes bear witness to this becoming.
Is this how home feels? Warm, safe, settled, content. Like a place I want to be – though not a place, a state of being I encode into my cells, sinew, synapses. One I can access through breath, touch, smell, light streaming in through an east-facing window, but not bound by an address or even a geographical landscape. Maybe the irrevocable landscape is the body itself. It is always changing, yet also always mine. We are never apart.
That is how I want to relate, too, to this life, this love, the body of our bodies together, a state of home that can never be misplaced. The only maps we need are each other's eyes, hands, ungated hearts.
Surely that is different from the route I used to depart my parents' house. Back then, I did not know how to be in a body. It would take many years and misguided patterns to puzzle myself together.
Now, I know. I know where I am and I know what I want and I know where I want to be headed: in the direction of this lucid sense of self, in the direction of being more and more at home within myself and the contours of this life with all of its shapes and edges and smooth corners and quiet crevices and winding paths I have yet to wander.
And I want to be headed that way with you, so that home will always be wherever we are together. In this way (with a hat tip to Emily Dickinson) every day becomes a love letter – to my love, to my life, to the world.