Saturday, December 02, 2006

Home Is Where The Heart Is


This was yesterday's Daily Om:
Wherever You Are
Home Is Where The Heart Is

The word "home" has a wide variety of connotations. To some, home is merely a place where basic needs are addressed. To others, home is the foundation from which they draw their strength and tranquility. Still, others view home as a place inexorably linked to family. Yet all these definitions of home imply somewhere we can be ourselves and are totally accepted. There, we feel safe enough to let down our guard, peaceful enough to really relax, and loved enough to want to return day after day. However, these qualities need not be linked to a single space or any space at all. Home is where the heart is and can be the locale you live in, a community you once lived in, or the country where you plan to live someday. Or home can be a feeling you carry inside yourself, wherever you are.

The process of evolution can require you to undergo transformations that uproot you. Moving from place to place can seem to literally divide you from the foundations you have come to depend on. Since your home is so intimately tied to the memories that define you, you may feel that you are losing a vital part of yourself when you leave behind your previous house, city, state, or country. And as it may take some time before you fashion new memories, you may feel homeless even after settling into your new abode. To carry your home with you, you need only become your own foundation. Doing so is merely a matter of staying grounded and centered, and recognizing that the pleasures you enjoyed in one place will still touch your heart in another if you allow them.

Your home can be any space or state of being that fulfills you, provided you are at peace with yourself and your surroundings. A person can feel like home to you, as can seasons and activities. If you feel disconnected from what you once thought of as home, your detachment may be a signal that you are ready to move one. Simply put, you will know you have found your home when both your physical environment and energetic surroundings are in harmony with the individual you are within.
In March I will have been in Tucson for five years. Yet so much of me resists thinking of Tucson as my home. I dream about moving back to Seattle, or to Portland, or trying a new place -- maybe Boulder, or Durango, or even going to the East Coast and trying Vermont or New Hampshire. All the while my body and my life are here in the Sonoran Desert.

My tendency is to look to the landscape for a sense of home, to identify with trees and rivers and mountains and wildlife. I believe that we are drawn to archetypal areas of the continent that connect with some aspect of the psyche. And I believe that this is shaped in large part by where we grew up.

My family moved to Southern Oregon when I was nine years old. At first I was devastated that I could no longer ride my bike to the 7-11 to get baseball cards with my allowance. The nearest 7-11 was now 21 miles away.

But I quickly learned to enjoy the wildness, the freedom. When I think of that landscape, what I remember are the trees I climbed, the creeks and rivers I swam in and fished, the mountains I explored. I don't think about the people, the culture, or anything else -- it's the primal nature that shaped that part of my life.

When I finished college and moved to Seattle, it was still the land that I felt connected to -- the nature so present in the midst of the city. Lake Union borders downtown, and from Wallingford's Gasworks Park the lights on the water could be amazing. Then there is Lake Washington separating Seattle from Bellevue and Kirkland, a vast lake with many coves and bald eagles fishing the cold waters. And near the University is the arboretum, where thousands and thousands of crows gather each night to share the days events.

But my sense of Seattle as home also include the people and the places. In Seattle, I could be myself -- as weird or as quiet or as geeky as I am -- and no one cares. The culture up there encourages a certain degree of being different, as long you are still hip and ironically detached. Even so, I felt at home in the city because there were other people like me. And because the city has cafes and museums and bookstores that feel so comfortable.

I feel none of that in Tucson. Not the land, not the people, not the culture. But strangely, my life is working better here than it ever has at any other point. There are still areas that need improvement, like meeting peers with similar interests. One of things I have found here is that my relationships are ghettoized to a degree. I have a racquetball friend, a Buddhist friend, an integral friend, and so on. I haven't found anyone who shares multiple interests with me -- which makes it hard to have actual, real friends. On the other hand, my social anxiety makes it hard to meet new people. But my job is helping in that area, teaching me how to get along in social settings to a certain degree.

As I step back and look at the trajectory of my life from a geographical stance, I had been moving continually north on a vertical axis -- Los Angeles, Southern Oregon, Seattle -- until coming to Tucson. Looking back, I tend to see the time in Oregon at the pre-egoic stage, the time in Seattle as the egoic, and this time in Tucson as "the regression in service of ego" that is necessary to move beyond the egoic.

Much of my inner work here has been about identifying and healing old wounds and poorly navigated developmental stages. My relationship with Kira certainly offered many lessons in reclaiming my emotional life, setting boundaries, and learning more about who I am in relationship and, now, out of relationship.

In a large sense, my life in Tucson is about reclaiming my heart. I have thought at various times in my life that I had accomplished that task -- with Celeste in college, in the shamanic work I did in Seattle, and with Kira here in Tucson. But each time it seems there are deeper and deeper layers of the work. So it's not about where I am or who I am with -- it's about me and my life.

Wherever I am, that is where the heartwork will be -- and that's where I will be at home for that time in my life. Right now, Tucson is my home.


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