Finding Home
What on Earth does ‘Finding Home’ mean to me and why does it matter?
Many years ago, I made a choice. It was a coming of age choice: I left the home I had known in the Endless Mountains to travel to an unknown land and spend a year learning a new language, immerse myself in a culture very different from what I had known, and live with a family, not related by blood. It was a departure that I expected to last a little less than a year. One that would end with me returning to my ‘normal’ life. I did return and yet when I did, ‘normal’ no longer existed. My family had moved from the place I considered my home to a new city and state hundreds of miles away.
Over time, I adjusted to my new surroundings and then headed out on another adventure, and then another and another. Always seeking…something. Always longing, for home.
At some point, I settled for not having or knowing a home. I made the best of where I was and who I was with, always hoping that the place would reveal itself or the person would accept me enough to share their home. I got very close and yet, the longing did not wane, in fact it came into stark focus, palpable emptiness. My functional and successful life began to crumble around me.
Around this time I began to observe (and later practice) what I call Earth Integration. A biologist by trade, I had felt the same cavernous divide in the environmental policies and organizations with which I worked. So many people, including myself, were dedicating their lives to the pursuit of stewardship and natural resource conservation and yet the wheels turned slowly and ground was being lost, literally (and figuratively) year after year. Something was missing: a spark, a knowing, a connection - buy-in.
When all that I had known no longer held sway in my life, Earth Integration became my mantra. “What does it mean? “ I would ask. “How does it work?” The answers I received were to play with the concept and experiment with anything that piqued my interest: to face my fears of not fitting in. So, I quit my job and took a ‘sabbatical’ to explore and play. I studied herbalism, mythology, folk magic, tarot, Women’s Rites of Passage, astrology, cheesemaking, animal husbandry, dreamwork, and lived in intentional community raising food, animals and children. All of this play initiated over a period of 6-8 months. Then I received a phone call offering me a position at the University. I jumped on it: my playfulness had left me quite broke. I could feel home reaching out to me and see the landscape in my dreams. I could not ignore the call any longer.
At this point, I had a realization that this longing for home was directly related to Earth Integration. My purpose here on Earth at this time is to facilitate healing of the collective trauma the majority of humans are facing. Most of us have severed our connection to the Earth over several generations. As a consequence, we have slowly drifted from our inner knowing, our intuitive guidance.
I knew at this moment if I was going to genuinely dedicate myself to this path, I must clearly access and learn to trust my own intuition. What I have found on this most recent leg of my journey is that I have been home all along, right here, in my very own beautiful and blessed skin.
