Homing
The return to home is particularly important if one has been bound up in worldly matters and overstayed their time there. What is that length of time that brings us to overstaying? It is different for each of us. We know when we are overdue for home, that place within us that brings us to our center, to nature, to our authentic self where creativity, reflection and intuition reside within us. We know we are overdue for home when our bodies are in the here and now, but our minds are far, far away. They are dying for new life. The are panting for the sea. They are living for next month, just until the spring ends, just after the holidays, just waiting until this winter of overstaying is over so they can feel alive again. Pining for some mystical future date where we can finally be free to do some wonderous thing. There is a quality of mourning to it all. There is angst, bereftness. There is wistfulness. There is longing. There is plucking the threads from the hem of one’s shirt and staring long from windows. It stays and grows more and more intense over time. We are being called home. We are beginning the journey of homing that beckons from deep within us to move towards, to run towards our wild nature. We are divided.
Wolves are a perfect example of homing. There are no divided feelings about going or staying with wolves. They are both communal and deeply independent. Wolves take time to work whelp, rest, and rove in cycles. They are part of a pack that shares in working and caregiving while others take time away. It is a good way to live. It is a way to live that has all the integrity of the wild feminine. We must discover the feminine and the masculine within us and balance them. To much time away in the world speaks to standing in an over masculine stance and the balance of the feminine calls. It calls and arrives through the journey of homing.
Going home means many things to many people. For some homing is taking your kitchen chair out into the garden to sit and stare at the sky and the sun with eyes wide open. For others it is time in nature or going on a trip or lying on the ground in dappled light, a silent retreat or in the quiet of a cabin by the ocean or in the middle of a forest. It might be boarding a bus to any destination, or driving in any direction for an hour to simply follow the moments ahead of you and delighting in what comes into your experience, or simply sitting in a café writing. There are many ways to go home, many paths to homing. Many of the ways are mundane and some are Divine.
It is not necessarily an arduous journey, this homing, but it is not simplistic either for there is much resistance in going home no matter if it is easy or hard. There is this intrinsic delay in us in going home.
What is homing? It is the instinct to return, to go to the place we remember. It is the ability to find, whether in dark or in daylight, one’s home place. We all know how to return home. No matter how long it’s been, we find our way. We go through the night, over strange land, through tribes of strangers without maps. We ask over and over, “What is the way?” But the exact answer to “Where is home” is more complex. It is in many ways an internal place, a place somewhere in time rather than space and it is a place where we feel of one piece. Home is where thought or feeling can be sustained instead of being interrupted or torn away from us because of something demanding of us. Home is a pristine instinctual life that works easily, where all is as it should be, where all noises sound right and the light is good and we are calm rather than alarmed.
How one spends their time when they arrive home is not important. Whatever revivifies balance is what is essential. That is home. The most important thing about the timing of this homing is this: When it’s time, it’s time! Even if you are not ready, we go because it is time and therefore, we must.
Some never go home and live their life in a sort of asleep state without the joys of passion, wild abandon, and the discovery of what draws them to their true nature. It is our soul that has left us and has left the feeling no matter what we do we no longer feel quite substantial. It is this discontent that calls us to this cycle of homing. Discontent is the secret door to significant and life-giving change.
Homing.
Quoted throughout from the book Women Who Run with the Wolves by Clarissa Pinkola Estes
