Homecoming

I feel strongly that I have a responsibility to all the sources that I am: to all past and future ancestors, to my home country, to all places that I touch down on and that are myself, to all voices, all women, all of my tribe, all people, all earth, and beyond that to all beginnings and endings…(writing) frees me to believe in myself, to be able to speak, to have voice, because I have to.

Joy Harjo

So much of life is driven by containment. 

When something spills beyond its borders, it's perceived as an error. An unacceptable breach. Not expansion, exploration, a stretching into wholeness, newness.

Disorder that must be made right.

Like liquid escaping its vessel. Like chaos crashing around a restless spirit. Like emotions too spacious for a single heart. Like knowledge and mentalities that flourish beyond the confines of another’s mind.

We are told who we are. What we are. How were are. Corralled into our “rightful” place, the one that makes people feel comfortable, safe. This is how unsafe harbors take shape: from the effort to tuck others neatly within a person's own limitations. From the subconscious attempts to steady recognizable foundations.

So the self learns to reorient around the voids, the silence, the condemnation. The wreckage of humans shackling each other in unnecessary ways.

Throughout my own winding journey, I knew that I never felt a sense of belonging — at school, in jobs, in cultural/societal/familial structures. I knew that I felt rooted in an essence I couldn't explain; something pervasive, formless, nameless.

I didn't know that attunement to a collective consciousness isn't necessarily a universal experience; or that living a multi-dimensional existence may not be a common reality for all of us navigating the world as human. I didn’t have language for the different levels of consciousness that I naturally traverse. I wasn't familiar the clair senses beyond clairvoyance . . . despite experiencing life through them. It took time for me to realize that I connect with people's various frequencies seamlessly, even if they are not consciously connected to those energies within themselves. 

And yet, I did know. I knew that I felt interconnected threads weaving through all things. I knew that the “real world” that other people seemed to inhabit felt toxic to me, that every attempt to ground me in established structures felt like betrayal. A kind of soul violence. I knew that human interactions often left me confused, bereft, wounded.

I knew that books felt like home. That music was a portal, cracking open new textures inside of me. I knew that I didn't feel alone within the richness of my inner world, because art that reflected my layers always found me — a harmonious community that has held me, tenderly. I didn’t know that the beauty, the ecstasy of those experiences was call & response, synchronicity, a continuous, divine dialogue.

I knew that writing was salve, sanctuary. I didn’t know it would be the only place where I would feel free to inhabit all of my selves. Where I can dance to my own sacred song. Where I can rest and revel in the passions that enlighten, enliven me. Where I can belong to myself and thrive in all the sources that I am, instead of merely surviving what has been placed upon me. Where it is simply me and whatever is moving through me, sighing into the joy of its becoming.

When external noise overwhelms me, I know that I always have my favorite literature, films, shows, songs. The pleasure of how they fracture and re-shape themselves through me, birthing something new within. The way they recall what is ancient, eternal; before and after this form, this time, this realm.

This is how we find each other: in pages that were once trees, in photographs, in brushstrokes and scents and sounds that capture and reveal something beyond words, transporting us, returning us.

This is how we awaken ourselves to each other: through conversations that illuminate different ways of being, through the delightfulness of exploring new colors outside the lines, through lives that create their own unique molds, shattering every “should.”

This is how we bring each other home.