Returning home

There’s a lovely feeling about coming home after a holiday – whether it’s been relaxing, fun or stressful, or perhaps all three. When I get home, I need to get out of the house quick – no matter how many bags needs to be unpacked and loads of washing done – and walk around the place I call home, noticing and taking it all in.

I used to think I was just ‘checking the place was okay’ – visiting the chooks to see if they needed anything, walking through the garden – noticing that the broccoli has gone to flower and realising I should have picked it before I went, looking at the water tanks, seeing how full the dam is.

But this time returning home after a week with family in Melbourne, I realised I wasn’t just checking to see if things were okay on the land I am privileged to live on, I was checking myself back in to my place. I was reconnecting.

I noticed the ways, in my absence, that water had moved soil and leaves through the landscape – it looked like we’d had some heavy rain. I heard – more vividly than usual – the magpies calling when taking my morning bushwalk – the one I do every day my children are at their other home. And I slowed down enough to let in the feeling that those magpies were welcoming me back.

After experiencing a week of buying all my food at supermarkets, I decided to not go to the shops, and to see how well my garden could feed me, along with whatever bits and pieces I had in the jumble of my freezer.

I always have less time in my vegetable garden than I’d like, and therefore it’s less productive than I’d like. And I often feel I don’t really eat that much from it – not nearly as much as I’d like to. Or as much as I ‘should’, I unhelpfully tell myself sometimes, when ‘shoulds’ sneak in like the unwelcome old patterns that they are.

But walking through my garden on my return home, I am thrilled by what I find. Oranges, passionfruits, broccoli with long sweet stems and tasty yellow flowers, sweet potatoes, a nibbled-on wombok cabbage. It’s not heaps but I realise I don’t need heaps. And I realise that whatever little food we grow ourselves is a wonderful achievement and a liberating step away from that total reliance I felt on the long food chains and duopoly of supermarkets I experienced while travelling. (I’m sure there are wonderful farmers’ markets in Melbourne; I just didn’t take the time to find them.)

And the acts of finding that food in my overgrown garden – picking up the oranges, digging the sweet potatoes, fossicking around in the overgrowth for the wonderful prize that is a winter passionfruit – are acts of reconnection. Reconnection with my place, and with my earlier self who planted the sweet potatoes and hammered in the stakes for their climbing structure; who pruned, composted, netted and watered the orange tree; who trained the passionfruit vine. And it’s not all about the outcome either, it’s the process – hearing the familiar sounds of home, the smells of the garden, moving my body in familiar and grounding ways, doing and being with nature, rather than thinking. There’s a feeling that I know this place, and that this place knows me.

For many people, coming home to themselves, and reconnecting after the discombobulation of travel, occurs in other ways. Maybe your favourite beach brings you back into yourself, the park near home where you walk your dog, listening to music while you cook, reading a novel in your own bed, the rhythm of chopping wood, dancing, a moment of silence and solitude at sunset. For me, nature and my home are the perfect rebalance after the sensory overload of airports, city traffic and the multitude of faces, and the heightened needs of children away from their familiar settings and rhythms.

And reconnecting to ourselves is required for many reasons – the challenges of parenting, the needs of intimate relationships, being caught up in worldly and mundane matters for too long, the push push push of life’s demands, a soulless job, or work that’s just too much – too many hours, too many deadlines, too many people wanting things of us. Most of us need to come home to ourselves for myriad reasons.

Coming home to my place enabled me to come home to myself, in the way Clarissa Pinkola Estes talks about when exploring the myth Sealskin, Soulskin in her book Women Who Run with the Wolves. She explores how we lose our soul skins through life in many and varied ways but ‘finding the skin again, putting it on … going home again, helps us be more effective when we return’. She says ‘the exact answer to ‘what is home?’ is more complex … but in some ways it is an internal place, a place somewhere in time rather than space, where a woman feels of one piece. Home is where a thought or feeling can be sustained instead of being interrupted or torn away from us because something else is demanding our time and attention.’

Where and how do you feel ‘of one piece’? I’m curious about what this kind of ‘home’ feels like, and how we return to these places for ourselves in both time and space.