At Home in Surrender
Even before we left the farmhouse, I began to feel like a crab without my shell. Vulnerable, raw, desperately curious about what might contain us next.
Without home, I’ve come to realize that to have a container in which to live had informed the simplest sense of my identity. Without home, the story of me is without a setting.
Our family is on a quest for home. It’s been years now - for me, it’s maybe been like this my whole life.
“Where are you from?” has always been a question that has caused me to squirm, but where I live? I used to at least be able to answer that. Where I’m from requires a story and a listener. Often time the querent is just looking for a quick response. For me, there is none. And the story is now getting longer.
It started in Hong Kong (three homes there), then Taiwan (where my Kindergarten teacher at the International School asked each kid where we were from and I rambled on about being born in Hong Kong but not being from, because my parents were from Morocco and America and therefore deciding I was just “Kong”), then California at nine (where I had major culture shock), then an outskirt of New York (I hate admitting I lived in New Jersey), then Brooklyn (as soon as I could get out of that homogenous town whose high school touted a “Tradition of Excellence”), then Vermont (where I learned to wildcraft and grew my gardening skills), then three years of travel in Europe, China, India, then back to the States (where I traveled for six months to find him), then New Mexico (where we fell in love, got married, started 2 Wolves), then Vermont where we started Golden Well and had our babies. We nested for a good ten years in Vermont - it was the longest I lived anywhere, yet our sense of community just started to root.
And now? Now we are unhomed, home-less, between homes, uprooted, homeless. Now we are living on the wind. Now we are on a quest for home.
As our days of questing turn into weeks and now months, I’m beginning to wonder what I crave more - being able to tell my story in a way that lets me feel like I belong, or to feel a sense of belonging to a people or a land?
For now, I rely on my practices, my breath, whatever part of the Earth I find beneath my feet. When you ask me where I live, I might answer or I might give you the long stare that says I’m currently residing in a perpetual free fall, an ego death, the long pause between stories and form. For now, I am making my home in the surrender required from living in the In-Between.