When I am wearing a scarf wrapped around my shoulders
When I am writing
When I remember to dab the space between my breasts with lilac-scented perfume
When I am standing at the front of a room, teaching and sharing knowledge
When I hear nothing but the crunch of my boots on a path and the mourning doves echoing their sweet love songs back and forth
This is when I feel most at home.
This is when I feel most myself.
I’ve been deeply curious about the idea of belonging for several years now.
It started, I think, when I realized that I had lived in the place I do now for seventeen years
the same number of years I lived in the place I had always thought of as home.
I had lived apart from my family of origin for that long, too
and yet I still felt as though this place I live and the web of new familial connections I had spun were somehow temporary.
I felt a bone-aching loneliness when I realized that home was a place and a family I no longer knew as intimately as I once did.
As a balm,
I turned toward tending my new roots.
I learned about how my own ancestry intertwined with that of my adopted land many generations ago
and wondered about how my ancestry might have unconsciously influenced not just the ground I walk on today
but also my curiosities and inclinations and gifts.
As a balm,
I realized that the resilience to my lost sense-of-place lay in belonging to myself
and so I set out to make peace with who I have become
to accept her unconditionally
to show up and tend to her body and her soul so as to coax her out of hiding
and give her the courage to stand tall and wild.
As a balm,
I redefined mothering
as something I could do for myself
and I found the First Mother
in the limbs of trees and the lapping of the waves.
With every barefoot step
brave word
creative act
and ancient remembering