Where is Home?

I am on my way to DC from Florida.  Both states have previously been referred to, by me, as “home.”  Neither are currently called that.  I will be staying in Maryland, a state I have also resided in a few times and was even born there.  But is not home to me now. 

So interesting that I keep circling back to places I have left of my own volition.  Places I have lived, loved, worked, and ultimately, left.  I am still not sure why the universe keeps bringing me back to places I have studiously vacated, but it does and today, I guess I am grateful for the circle back, the repeat as this newer, more evolved version of myself.  (Well, I guess the evolution is debatable, but I am gonna claim it anyway).

I have moved over 50 times in my life.  Probably upwards of 60 or 70 but I am too lazy to count them out.  Never content to reside in one spot, first because the US Army dictated it.  Next because I, perhaps maybe, thought the Army was onto something and I became an ever changing shapeshifter that gypsied her way through life.  

I have inhabited the Eastern US, the South Eastern, the MidWest, The West, and the Southwest leaving open, as far as actual residents a vacancy in the Pacific Northwest and New England.  And I can see me residing in both those places, but not year round.  I am a delicate flower when it comes to Winter and rain.  Much preferring the high desert climate over tropical or blustery regions.

I have written about this topic before and concluded home resides within us.  It is a geographical locale but it is also a spiritual plane.  A place where spirit resides.  I guess today I marvel at how many places I have given the moniker “home” to and how much none of those previously named locales feels like home to me anymore.

Home feels like Ojai.  All the people I love best in this world are there.  My parents, my kids (save one who is currently serving our country but will be stationed close by soon), my pets, my friends, my sanctuary.  So much of me has happened there.  So much of my life has unfolded in this place that felt like home the moment I arrived.  And I even tried leaving and it brought me back, back into my very small orbit and life that exists most days within a one mile radius.

Sure I dream of leaving, of moving northward to places that are wetter, less populated and colder.  But that is not a permanent desire.  It is an escape fantasy from a life well built that doesn’t really need an escape hatch.  One does not need to escape from a life well built and maintained.

I think I am finally done with the whole grass is greener thing.  Life will never be better somewhere else.  Life will just be life in a new location.  I will not magically be more motivated, develop better hobbies and interests.  I will not be better over there, unless and until, I am better right where I am.

People have good reasons for selecting new “homes:”  cheaper properties, less people, better job opportunities, having to work less, commute less, closer to family.  And I suppose some of those things are available to me...but I have no real desire to exercise them anymore.  I love my home and it reflects back to me, all the versions of myself I have been and with some effort, might become.

Home is a place that resides within but without a physical anchor locking you in place, you are vanquished by the winds of change and time to other locations that do not serve your heart or your soul.

I guess home is wherever you decide to land.  I mean, really land.  To own your life and all the problems, issues, disappointments, longings, griefs, joys, happinesses and loves.  Perhaps home is a decision to live your life from the place you are currently located that can remain tethered to an actual physical plane no matter where you are.  Home will always be filled with a whole mess of mixed emotions.  I will never know what it might feel like to have one place in the world that is home.  I only have the experience that home is a place that manifests wherever I am.  And more recently to a little mountain town that holds my heart, my body, my soul and my family.

Where is home?  It is over there, but my love for it and willingness to return to it can only persevere if home is a place deep inside me that is tended to with love and adoration.  It is the place within me that the deep well of life and living emanates from...and while the physical anchor of a place of longitude and latitude can be wherever you might want, if there is no corresponding receptor within your own soul, home is a place that cannot ever be found.  They mirror each other, the outside and the in.  Without one the other cannot exist.