Since the Coronavirus lockdown, I’ve been attempting to give myself two hours every Monday morning to get settled and prepared for the week. Instead of jumping straight into work, I decided it would be useful to have Mondays 8a-10am to myself. Of course, I justified this by the fact that I work until 7pm on Mondays, so 10-7 is still an 8 hour work day.
This morning, I find it difficult to know what to do with myself. I started to journal.
“What would make me feel happy right now? I’m not sure. I feel sad at that thought. Why? There is no constant state of joy. I have spent so much of my life wishing for ‘not pain’ - for relaxedness and when it arrives, it feels so nice. But to not grasp at it, as if I have to cling forever, that’s true freedom. My heart aches this morning and that’s okay. What do I need on heart ache days? Slowness. Kindness. Cuddles. I don’t have to DO anything right now.”
I started thinking about the “self projects” that I have in place, to help me focus on myself when I feel like working and I know it’d be good for me not to work. One of them is to pick some pictures from my Yosemite hike and print them on canvases or to put in large frames for hanging in my house. Looking through these pictures allowed me to grieve some more.
This past week, it’s been starting to hit me that I am not moving back to California any time soon. I keep saying “I am probably not going to move” but I think that the word probably is what allows me to obscure the grief. Sure, things can always happen that we don’t expect. But from everything I know about my life and that I’m planning for it, I will not be moving back.
A big part of my life in California was camping and backpacking. The pictures above are from a 3 week hike I took in late July/early August 2017, not long before I moved to England. I will likely be talking about this trip for the rest of my life. It was life changing in subtle and not-so-subtle ways. Nearly three years later, I am realising just how much that trip was a goodbye trip. It was consciously a transition trip. I had been planning to do a long backpacking trip since I graduated from university in 2006. As life would have it, it took me 11 more years to actually be able to make it happen.
I was on my own in ways I never knew were possible. I was single at the time. And although I had been single before, this time it felt different. I was dating off and on but not feeling under any self-imposed pressure to meet “the one” or to find my life mate. I was preparing my heart and mind to move 5000 miles. Months before my trip to Yosemite, I moved into a friends house and let go of so many possessions. I remember leaving possessions that I had conscously bought to keep for a long time, say, when I would own a home in California.
Many of those are no longer with me. But what is deeply within me is the memory of an unwavering sense that I would live in California forever. I remember thinking that I needed to move away to better appreciate California. To genuinely choose it. Again, as life would have it, that isn’t in my current vision of the future. My home state has changed in so many ways. It was transforming at rapid speed when I was there. I paid $1350 (over £1000) for a studio, and that was the cheapest I could find. Social workers with Masters degress from UC Berkeley, the #1 public university in the world, were also working second jobs to pay the bills. What used to be a 30-45 minute drive from Oakland to San Francisco became 2 - 3 hours. But despite all of this, that place was my home.
I told a relatively new friend that I was grieving the loss of a life in CA, and she said she knew what it meant to be homesick. It never occurred to me that this might be what I was feeling. It didn’t take long after my move to the UK to realise just how much I was constantly worried that I would run into my abusers in CA. I started relaxing a bit, and then I also realised how I hadn’t heard gunshots in ages. I am learning that feeling homesick doesn’t mean that you loved everything about home. For me, I am mourning the sense of familiarity, the sense of self that I carried, especially the sense of self that I carried when I was in the woods, with a pack on my back, and just walking.
Just having the knowledge that this sense of self existed within me has bouyed me during some difficult times in the UK. For the past 2.5 years I have yearned to “get my self” back. I have wanted to go back to Yosemite to feel the same again. But really, I know that it will never be the same. This week, I started feeling like I have more of my self back. There’s a quality to it taht is similar to my Yosemite self, but of course it’s different. It’s a self that has had three years, living away from home and building. a new home. It’s a self that knows one can build a new home and love it, while feeling sad for leaving an old home.
I know that this feeling is a privilege to only now wake up to. Refugees and survivors of modern slavery who have ended up in new places did not get to make the choice to leave their home the way I did.
I am learning more and more that home really can exist inside of us, and the joy of home can co-exist with the loss of home. Joy is not a constant state of being. And it doesn’t need to be.
As it is outlined in The Guest House by Jelaluddin Rumi:
This being human is a guest house.
Every morning a new arrival.
A joy, a depression, a meanness,
some momentary awareness comes
as an unexpected visitor.
Welcome and entertain them all!
Even if they are a crowd of sorrows,
who violently sweep your house
empty of its furniture,
still, treat each guest honorably.
He may be clearing you out
for some new delight.
The dark thought, the shame, the malice.
meet them at the door laughing and invite them in.
Be grateful for whatever comes.
because each has been sent
as a guide from beyond.
Translation from The Essential Rumi by Coleman Barks