01 Nov Home, please come home

The ability to turn your face towards home is one of the great Human endeavours and the great Human story.  

-David Whyte

Home, please come home.

My deepest soul longing is to know I’m home. This goes beyond having the right house, car, or family. It goes beyond tracing the footsteps of my ancestors to their place of origin. It goes even beyond the boundaries of this earth as my eyes seek out the dim light of the stars through the city’s light.

It feels insatiable, a hunger that yearns to be satisfied. It wants to be found. To me home is a feeling of unshakable belonging, a ground that you can sink your feet into and stay as long as you wish, a wide table full of nourishing food filled with people with glad shining faces, palms open and welcoming, the place where it all makes sense. This can feel like a far cry from life we tumble around in, the one where it can feel as though disconnect is the norm.

The energy for the month of November Is calling us home, it asks us to touch our fingers into the wellspring of our own being, to use the courage to CREATE we cultivated in October to dive towards our Center. The longer nights are guiding us in, in towards the light we often forget we have.

I’ve searched for home by leaving the place I was born and settling away from the prairies that raised me. I’ve searched for it in lovers, each face and body I tried to read like a map back to myself. I’ve searched in art, and books and foreign lands. I’ve looked for traces of home in spiritual teachers, in movies, in food. All these places were temporary, and kept turning me- sometimes painfully, (ok, always painfully,) back around so I had no other place to look but inside myself.

Theresa of Avila, a beloved Christian mystic had the radical idea that the Divine that she sought resided not somewhere out in the heavens as she was taught in the church, but deep within the human soul, every single soul. It was heretical at the time, to think that divinity would make its house inside of us flawed as we are, but I take great comfort in the notion that no one is left out of this great pilgrimage, that we are all given the opportunity to find a refuge in our own being. November is calling us to remember what is inside of us, that we are alive, and while we are, there is more to discover.

In this house
All must be friends,
All must be loved,
All must be held dear,
All must be helped.

-St. Theresa of Avila

She also mentioned that to reach this inner castle one had to have the Courage to face the gremlins that guard it, the walls we place around ourselves must be scaled, the doors we locked, must open. And when we reach promising rooms and chambers that are comfortable and spacious, can we have the fortitude to keep going, breaking through our limited perception of what we think it possible?

Can we allow ourselves to be that open, palms turned up to receive all of who we are without exception?

I do believe that when we open seats to our inner table and let the wayward, unseemly parts of us to belong, it changes how much we can open to others around us, how generous we can allow ourselves to be.

Let this month return you to your self care practices, take a moment of your day to write, or sit in quiet. Spend time alone, cook nourishing warming foods, follow your curiosity towards the things that light you up and begin to put down the heavy weight of trying to be someone you are not.

I know we are up for the task of finding home, because all that is required is a willingness to yearn for something more; more satisfying, loving and true. Those yearnings are the breadcrumbs we follow back to ourselves.

May our journey home be blessed,

With Love,

Jacqui