What makes a Home?
Wandering questions
“You’ve been searching for a home as long as I’ve known you. Mother this child. She will be your home.”
I’m haunted by my old friend’s words from my pregnancy in 2017.
I’m sitting here to write, Cali by my side, under the back awning, a surprise end-of-summer rain dripping around us. Every single one of our 12 animals has joined us, chickens clucking, cats purring, Luna stoic as ever, a guardian to us all. Only the new jumping spider stays inside, a forgotten 13th, Cali reminds me. Oops!
Indeed, we have become a home.
And yet, I search.
Last Fall, we made a pilgrimage through the East Coast, visiting friends and family from Pennsylvania, to NYC, upstate New York, and Vermont.
Stopping off in Syracuse to visit my dear friend, Vera, a wandering tomcat visited us daily. Cali, arms ever as open to new animal family as mine, asked if we could bring him back with us to California.
“No, love. This guy is home here. He may not have a house. But you see how he welcomed us so eagerly. I have a feeling we’re not the exception. Some creatures need to wander. They make homes in many places and go fill up on love here and there.”
A moment later it dawned on me.
“I’m kinda like that cat.” Vera smiled at me knowingly with a little chuckle.
Part of my wander is a peaceful wild, part of it is a readiness to run.
“You’re a Scorpio, so you yearn for travel, to understand the world by seeing it all. Yet it’s also here in your chart that you need a haven, a place to return to where you can seclude yourself to study for long periods.” My Reiki guide mapped my astrological chart for me. I’ve often held a bit of belief in reserves when it comes to these systems of knowing. Yet time and again a message will come through that’s so perfectly accurate I can’t deny the proof of wisdom in the mystics.
The both/and, I’ve always wanted it all.
I’ve grown comfortable with change over the more recent half of my life of travels and new dwellings. Something in me gets an itch, and I know it’s time to wander again.
Yet something in me also quietly begs, stay.
So with each new place I traverse, my mind spins with a million questions. Could this be it? The place in which I can grow deep roots, the place I’ve longed for to nest for generations, to finally cease the running that started at age 16, and pattered in my heart-beat long before that.
I’ve spent many long nights on Zillow, canvasing the world for places.
When we moved to our current house, part of me hoped for permanence. And I filled the place with life like it was mine to keep.
Though I still wonder if I’ll ever have the buying power for this home, part of me knows, when I do, I want more space than Southern California affords to those with a modest mortgage. I want to sprawl with far more creatures and be a haven for them all.
A lover held me the other night, and shared his vision of being a turtle.
“Most of our generation in the US might not get to experience home that way, owning property. I take comfort in imagining my home is my body, it’s always with me, like a turtle in it’s shell.”
To me, that felt sweet, hopeful, and not enough. My dream is bigger.
I long for consistent connection to land.
I grew up in the same place in Vermont from age 2 to 18. I stayed other places sometimes. It was complicated. But I had access to the same patch of land for over 20 years, returned to it time and again. I had tree friends I’d known all my life. I watched the land change slowly, like me. I knew the names of plant beings. (Last year I got the view tatted to forever commemorate the mountain and lake that shaped me and launched me.)
When I moved across the country, and that property was sold, I felt like I’d lost a limb. Here in Mediterranean, high desert and coastal climates of Southern California, I didn’t have the flora and fauna friends I knew. The Earth around me was a stranger.
Robin Wall Kimmerer speaks in her book, Braiding Sweetgrass, about becoming indigenous to place. Or rather, if not indigenous, naturalizing to a place. Over 9 years in the San Fernando Valley has brought me in closer kinship with the nature here.
But the harshness of the sun, the dryness of the earth, it won’t let my body settle. It’s just not “the way things are” like it was back home.
In another essay, I could explore even generations back, how memories in my DNA come from all corners of Europe and Scandinavia, and maybe even the Trail of Tears.
So really, what land is calling me home?
I keep searching.
A few weeks ago, I finally visited a communal dwelling.
I’ve talked about starting a queer, poly farm commune of artists and nomads for years. I finally realized I’d better start learning from people who are already pulling it off if its ever gonna be anything more than a pipe dream!
Cali and I visited Dancing Rabbit Ecovillage in Rutledge, MO and attended their weekend of song circling called Singing Rabbit.
Wow, oh wow is my heart so full! Singing in community was such a homecoming for me! A returning to my body and my voice after this disruptive health season, and a return to communal song without the damages of a punitive religious backdrop healed me in ways I can’t put into words.
This song in particular hit me in the solar plexis in one morning circle.
I belong to the woods and the waters.
I sobbed to the group how in many ways Cali and I are a home for each other. And yet I feel the weight of the question, “Where is our home?” magnified as I search for two!
I pondered throughout the weekend as I fell in love with the prairie, the bug songs, the stars.
Another song dawned on me. (Thank you Tomcat for these recordings of us all!)
You do not carry this all alone.
Again, I wept. This time prostrate into the grass. A maternal hand gently found my back, letting me know I wasn’t alone in grief. And it hit me. Home is people.
That’s what my friend had meant all along, all those years ago.
Home is community. Home is family. Home is people.
It’s a lesson I knew, and yet I have a feeling I’ll be expanding into for a lifetime.
Some part of my disorganized attachment trauma has held tighter to the safer attachment to land. I’ve kept people close yet loosely attached, like the tendrils of a beanstalk that will cling to and support whoever’s near, but just as easily wander elsewhere in search of their own patch of sun to survive if another’s shade blocks their light.
I realized that the level of unconditional commitment I’ve made to my daughter is one and only of it’s kind since breaking up with my family of origin the first time.
In witnessing the collaborative efforts to exist in sustainable community at Dancing Rabbit, I finally understood that the right patch of land is only half the equation. The right people to co-create with is what makes it home.
Here’s where it gets tricky.
Community building seems to be a transient, global, digital thing today.
If my dearest, most trusted people are scattered across the whole Earth, how can I ever be home? Will I always be a wandering cat, trying to keep them all?
This is the question I’ve realized is even harder to find peace with than the yearning for long belonging to land and place.
I have people who love me in many places far away. This hit me SO hard this year in the outpouring of support we received as I’ve navigated my health journey.
I also have people nearby willing and ready to be in community. Although LA often feels lonely to me, with the sprawling distance and busy-to-the-max culture that prevents the day-to-day togetherness I crave. In the last year, I have finally felt that accepting myself fully has landed me right in the pocket of my tribe in this city.
Maybe our generation collects a trail of digital avatars of the people we love who are too far to live in our village.
Yet we must still have the village.
Community building takes relational healing.
There’s no way around it. Many of our patterns of relationship building a communication are sadly far from operationally sufficient. In speaking with some elders of the community we visited, I learned of the struggles of finding a consistent process for conflict resolution and keeping the community safe.
It all felt so familiar. As deeply as I know home means people, I also know people mean hurt. I realized many years ago that unless I want to exclusively “belong to the woods and the water”, I needed to learn healthier ways of communication, conflict resolution, intimacy creation, and interdependence.
This has been my mission, not just for myself and Cali, but for everyone I can reach.
I can’t say I’m doing it perfectly, far from it. And I also can’t say there’s any perfect roadmap where people don’t ever get hurt. But I do know both theoretically and experientially, both cranially and somatically, that people can form deep, safe, stable bonds, that healthily handled conflict can actually deepen connection, that people don’t just mean pain, but promise. (Ha, on the typing of that very last sentence the sun broke through the clouds and light shone all around me. How dreamy!)
I don’t have a utopic communal farm to offer the world yet. I don’t have perfect partnerships to model. But I have spent years learning effective relational and communication skills and somatic modalities that are rewriting the trauma bonds so many of us were offered as relational models in early life.
The promise of people as home is that we are neuro-flexible, malleable beings who can unlearn old patterns and settle into improved ways of being and relating. Reading about and experimenting with nomadic stints has taught me just how wildly adaptable we humans are. And if we’re adaptable, can we choose to adapt to higher ways of relating and community building?
I know we can.
If you want to dive in with me in studying and PRACTICING these ways of relationship building and communicating, join us in the Whole Body Communicator’s Hub on Skool. I have self-paced coursework you can sink your teeth into and we all meet up in group zoom coaching sessions to explore the skills and practices that are so game changer.
Creator Corner Collective
Here’s where I highlight another artist, collective, small business. I’ve got to tell you about Dancing Rabbit Ecovillage. This place has been around since the Seventies and is a thriving beacon of sustainable communal living, land tending, and healing.
I highly recommend that you all check out their website, read their codes of conduct and pacts of coexisting with the planet. And if you’re feeling adventurous, hop on a plane, train, and automobile to go for one of their visitor programs or work-stays. (It’ll take that many vehicles to get you there but it’ll be worth it when you do!)
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Want to be highlighted in my letter? Reach out and tell me more about your work. I can include longer writings if you provide me with something to share. I want this to be a place for discovery for us all!
More creative stuff
You can check out more healing offerings at www.weepingwillowwellness.com
Book a FREE strategy session here to meet with me and discuss joining my 12 week somatic healing program, Whole Body Communicator
Find my music anywhere you stream. Just search Fermata Blaize!
Check out my children’s book The Possum And The Bunny
Listen to my podcast episode of the I Heart My Life show
Join the Whole Body Communicator’s Hub on Skool! Group coaching, course content and more!
And more to come!
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