on being home.
Home is an illusion. As I sit here and type this in an old city in an old library, I am not further away from Home than anyone else. Home is an illusion. We can plan our granite counter tops and hang those pictures really straight. Use fabric and silk and lights and pot the plants we hope to keep alive. Our pantry can be full and organized. Our landscape matured. We can arrange their toys and have the perfect fucking bathtub. We can imagine it would just be better if our house was sitting somewhere else and not here. But it’s not. It’s not home. Whatever way you look at it.
At least for some of us. I know I don’t speak for everybody or anybody for that matter. But even I know that dream piece of piece of land and the cute little timber frame cabins with strawbale in it’s bones isn’t gonna be home (sure it would help, but still, it’s just another illusion). Home is somewhere you can’t reach, the key is lost in the endless cushion of the old couch. The key is just a moment, a sliver of time that if we look with open eyes we might get a glimpse.
I keep getting the feeling I want this trip to end and I want to go home and in that same moment I am shocked with lightening strength that I am whipping up a crockery of shit. I am not further away from my home right now that I am when I wake up in the bed that my kid peed in 5 moments earlier. So I better get used to it. Get used to feeling that there is no Home.
The Universe keeps inviting me to claim home. And my home isn’t a path. The path is home.
I sat there and pinched myself about 100 times. I turned to the right and there was the ocean, the grungy alley way that led to hot sand. There is nothing like looking at Venice Beach from above.
I sat at her desk and looked at her things and crossed out many of my words with her red pen. Who is she? I don’t know. I know her name. I’ve watched her creations. But I have never met her. But the Universe invited me, somehow, to sit there on the same chair her ass sat on while she typed up something that many people tuned in to. She had already done what I am doing now, she had already hit that Sweet Little Spot I keep pecking away for. I lit her candle. I used her notepad. I read her mantra as it leaned in front of me, golden framed: No Matter. Try. Fail Again. Fail Better. -Samuel Beckett. The Universe invited me to pick up that key and Be Home in a strangers loft, atop the sea. At her desk. Writing. Willing to fail. Again. Better.
I was told that fear of failure isn’t what stops most of us from walking our path Home. It’s fear of success.
I am scared to go home. When I am home, when I own those papers and carve my initials on the walkway, then who will I be? What will I do? What if everything looks different and to be honest being unhappy or just happy or ecstatic or totally miserable, or constantly searching within my scene is quite comforting, or familiar. Or what I am used to. I am not scared to fail. I am scared to be a rock star.
Will my kids still love me?
Will my husband?
Will I still love them?
Will I want fake boobs?
Will I forget about my roots?
Will i have to cut my dreads?
Will I have to follow templates?
Will I have to create my own?
Will I still be scared of Tsunami’s?
Will have to start making decisions instead of letting the world make them for me?
Will I still be able to lay around and do nothing and eat chocolate and turn of my phone and keep myself from the world?
Will guilt eat me away?
Will success seduce me in ways that puts tantra to shame?
Will i still be me? Which is currently a diluted version of the Source of the Seed of the Passion Creation Incarnation Contract that somehow I signed before I landed on this Earth (the one that said Fear of Failure does not excuse me).
I can see it clearly but the clarity if fogged by a bunch of What if’s and Will I’s and Will You’s. Mostly the fear of getting swept away with the waves that comes along with the monsters of success.
The Universe has been inviting me to see those monsters smiling at me, reaching a hand out. Even the most ghastly beasts have a heart of gold. And fantastic herbal danish body products made with blueberries and orchid doves.
Who am I turn Her down, She who hums all life to breath? Who am I to tell her I am too busy hiding under my rock or being comfortably stuck in the mud of my childlike desires? Who I am to be too scared to leave Homelessness? To show my children that I accept my Path TO Home.
Who am I?
One who accepts the invitation and wears something shockingly inappropriate, shoulders back, heart pulsed forward, open, open, open. Laughing at failure as it steps up to me at the bar and willing to dance with it over and over again, then getting it so falling down drunk on Scotch Whiskey and Lime, that I take pity on it, but don’t offer it a hand back up for the next song.
I accept.
In other news, the girls have been having a blast. Oceans, mountains, desert, museums, friends old and young, new and old. Soul brothers and injured birds, soul sisters and cat fights of buddha necklaces, feathers….a lot of feathers. Yoga teachers and mediations in canyons. Chocolate and best friends. Drive bys past the old houses, the places where they were born, their first parks, mama’s favorite cuban coffee, dada’s favorite burger, godfathers and new godmothers. And sand. SAND. and Dolphins. DOLPHINS. AND SUN. THE SUN. THE.SUN.
Our wet Pacific Northwest bones have been dried out. Our skin is peeling, like reptiles we all shed the winter layer, solar rays have burned through the Old, blistered and wept, peeled and exposed. Each one of us, from oldest to youngest have been re-born, perfectly, as birth does.
We live well on the road. We eat well. We run. We sing. We learn. We fight. We negotiate deals. We fly through the night from eco-system to eco-system while the girls sleep and Him and I hold hands and recall how the moment feels so different than before.
Actually. I take that back. Home isn’t an illusion. It’s a constant state. Our constant state is Home.
