Home

“Don’t you miss your home?”, a fellow seeker asks.

“I have no home to miss”, I answer her, “or rather- anywhere I am at the moment, and where I relate to what I’m doing presently, becomes my home”.

***

At the first time in my life when I left my parent’s home and moved to the hectic city from a relatively quite neighbourhood, I didn’t find home. I would go back to the empty rented apartment after a day’s work and feel lonely. There was nothing there for me to relate to- it’s not as if the job was very soul-fulfilling (it did bring me more then enough money, but as I soon found out- money is not a currency to the soul), I was in a new place and didn’t have any friends around, and no hobbies or practice to get me pasting through the days at ease. I had a roof over my head, clean place, hot shower, but I had no peace of mind and no relation to the journey. There was no journey.

After a year I quit, took all my money, and went to a journey that altered the foreseen route of my life. The first big travel alone, I found out that my bag is my home. As a fellow-traveler said back then, “I am a turtle with my home on my back, I cary my home with me wherever I go”. Wherever I would lay down my big 70L backpack, that’s where my home became. Sometimes for one or two nights, sometimes for a month.

But after a while, 5 months, 6 months, 7…8… I started missing the “real” home. I was hiking up a valley on the other side of the world from “home” and crossed upon a familiar smell. It was the smell of a ripening fig tree, with the sound of the trickling water of a tiny fresh spring, and the sight of short trees upon the mountainside with the cooler micro-climate of shaded, a bit humid, spring-surrounding, in the middle of an arid area. Smells are a direct route to memory, and then and there I realised that I’m missing the war-infested mother-land that was then defined as my home.

***

Fast forward one decade later, many water flowed in the river of life, I am closing all the corners of my life upon the river up in the north of Israel, and going out, yet again, to a journey. This time, it’s a quest to find a teacher, start striding on a path. I take my full-of-emotions and memory backpack with me, and board on the plane. 3 connections later, tired and weak, I realise that my bag has not arrived. If home is where the bag is, am I homeless now?… and why do I need such a big thing to shlep around with me anyway, It’s much easier without all this excess baggage…

Carrying myself with me is carrying all that defines me to be me: I am an Israeli, I am a female, I have 3 decades of age (plus 2 years of newly added white hairs), I have quite a rational mind, I am suffering from recurring migraines, I am quite chronically ill, I am this, I am that, I am this, I am such… So much extra baggage of definitions that I carry with me, on me, as me, that will not allow me to be anything different then what I already am. But what I already was, was clearly not working…

And what about all the parts in me that are different then that? Aren’t they allowed a voice? Aren’t they a baggage I’m unconsciously carrying with me every day, unaware of their implications, being deaf to their voice but then acting automatically by their script?

It was then that I decided to go cary-on size, and it was then that I saw the male-teacher I thought I was searching for, but actually found a female one that would become a teacher and a friend on a much personal and one-on-one level. And it was then that home started to be anywhere, everywhere, that my heart is, leave alone the bag- bag or no baggage, home started to be any spot on which I strode, as long as I am connected to the current “mission life” of the moment and heartborne quest. Where there is a path, there is a home.

***

So to go back to my friend’s question, home is wherever I will be at the moment, as long as I’m aligned to my inner “me”s. So I never really miss home cause I’m most of the time AM in home, wether it’s in Patnem Quepem Wada with the hot humid beach sun, or Sunrise Guest House during monsoon in Dharamkot, with the corn leaves shining in the dew and misty clouds surrounding just before the rain falls.

***

I was chatting with a friend that said that a city that used to feel like home for many years, is not feeling like home for him anymore.

And I think of how Patnem River Side had stopped feeling home the moment the clinic season in Goa ended. The place I used to love so much, upon a different river and the nice little garden, between the coconut trees and 5 min walk through the palms to the beach, with the animals, chickens, water buffalos and mosquitoes. So many good moments (and also many moments of migraine when quitting allopathic painkillers), but the moment my mission in the spine clinic there ended, the place remained the same but the feeling has completely changed- there was no relation any more. It was not home. So it was time to pack up my clinic life and go live at Akash’s for a while, and that became my new home.

*

Traveling when I was young and disembodied, although I liked it very much, was always an emotional burden and a mental stress. Where should I go now? when should I leave? what should I do? so many choices and decisions to make and I was never quite sure that I made the “right” one. Questing with a path in mind, is a completely different case. Now it’s not that I particularly like the “traveling” part, but on the “living” part- living my life before I die, It’s not as straining when I remember to be with my inner body’s wisdom and voice. It’s much clearer when I am connected to my intuition. Cause really, there never is a doubt. Doing my practice every day, the body will speak, and if I’m attentive enough to it then I find that for the most important decisions, it always have a voice. And once I follow this voice, there’s hardly ever a dilemma. Where should I go? To where my body points. When should I leave? When the current quest is done. What should I do? only what my body agrees with.

What my body agrees with is not always comfortable and fun. Where my body leads is not always easy. But now that I have the path I have the inner trust, that what my body trusts- I shall trust it too. To have trust, is to always have a home. A home within me that even if it’s rainy and mouldy and not the best weather, I know it’s the right spot for me for now, for now until the quest is done and a new one begins.

Life for me, I found out, is a never ending quest, always changing and never the same, but always coming back full circle again. Coming back to the traumas, coming back to the fears, finding the pain and suffering in my tissues again and again and again. Coming back to the joys, finding them anew after so many years. Learning from grandma ayahuasca to cry, learning from Ringo’s stomach treatment to laugh, learning from so many big and small female and male teachers on the path.

Life is a home, and home is in me. As I breath to the big toe, as I breath to the chest, as I tread on the path, as I sense my bare feet. As I dance the lucid dance, as I forget and fall asleep while still “awake”, as I follow my patters blindly, as I notice one-to-a-million to a substantial script. As I stretch to the count, as I remember and forget.

Home is in me. Path is my life.

 

Angel heart / nick barber

Angel heart
Is this another ending or a start?
Is there any way that they could be apart?
In the end
We come full circle again

Gentle soul
You know each daily trouble takes it’s toll
But every silver lining hides a seam of gold
In the end
We come full circle again

Angel heart
Never be afraid to face the dark
If you are you’ll never let the healing start
In the end
We come full circle again

Gentle soul
Never be afraid to face the goal
Don’t you know the light you see is your own soul?
In the end
We come full circle again

Special One
Set your ship to sail into the sun
And when you finally get there you’ll have just begun
In the end
We come full circle again