A Sense of Place

The concept of home has been an ambiguous one for me since I gave up my giant Victorian apartment in Massachusetts in 2014. In a freshly painted cream-colored bathroom complete with a clawfoot tub, I suddenly found myself with everything at my feet, a job, a home and a relationship but yet, I did not identify with them as my own. My life was unrecognizable to me which seems utterly impossible when you’re the one that has created it.

What followed after was an unraveling in which the pace quickened by each week and month that passed by. An unraveling of the life I had known and my first step, or leap, towards seeking a sense of home within myself.

My college boyfriend, the same one that drove with me back and forth to New Jersey, who carried my sick labrador retriever in the pouring rain when he was too old to walk and was at my family’s side when my mom woke up from surgery when she had cancer, who packed me lunches of vegan burritos with cartoon faces drawn on the tin foil he wrapped them in, sat across from me on our thrifted leather couch next to the coffee table he had made from salvaged scrap wood and inscribed my name in a heart on the underside in red wax crayon and asked me with tears in his eyes and asked if I still loved him.

I did, but I wasn’t in love anymore.

I lied and said I think we just need space.

Weeks later he moved in with his parents, and I moved in with mine.

The journey of finding my sense of place on this planet has followed and has since led me to create a home in the most beautiful, and sometimes the most questionable of places on the journey to finding my way back home to myself.

The past three years in Costa Rica, the universe gifted me a reflection of my capacity to create, where I woke up just steps from a palm tree grove that opened out to the ocean and was rocked to sleep by the sound of the waves each day. I learned to ride a motorcycle - one of two key survival skills in Central America…learning Spanish being the other, but I never quite got there. I made friends that became family, taught yoga to beautiful people from all over the world, and had a deep initiation into being a guide for others through sharing my voice and my heart. I abandoned my self-worth and found it again, stepping into it more than ever before. I spent a lot of the time in a hammock and not as much in the ocean as I would have liked, believe it or not, but that’s okay.

A few years ago that place was in Morocco with no heat during the coldest winter on record (it snowed in the Sahara that year). It was painted wall to wall with the most offensive shade of hot pink and the shower was positioned over a squat toilet in a closet-sized bathroom in the common hallway. I started teaching yoga for the first time at a surf school nearby and I was petrified to use my voice and begin guiding others but by the end of it I had cultivated confidence and if not for that experience, I don’t feel my life would have taken the same trajectory. I learned to surf, got horrible food poisoning from Tajine which I will most likely never eat again and despite my irrational fear of random explosions, I learned to light a gas stove with a match that winter. I still have a photo of my hand holding the keys to that apartment.

If my places of living have followed my evolution I have definitely evolved - through each experience I have become who I am through the gifts and the challenges held within a place. But still, the hardest part of surrendering to that process is that the places that ultimately end up forming me I will leave behind to head the call of an internal pull toward where my heart knows it needs to go next for that continued evolution.

Sometimes it’s graceful and right on time, in others it’s overdue, and sometimes it’s confusing and just simply hurts to let go. Anyone who lives this way knows what it’s like to question their sanity at least once during the transition and I’m grateful to find solace in conversation with those who have chose a similar path to mine and comfort in the embrace of those that have roots in the place where I was born when I find myself in between places once again.

We have grown up in a society where we believe the concept of home to be based on external things that are formative to our identity. For those of us in the Western world we were taught it’s a big apartment or new house to hold all of our things, where our job is or our family. If we’re brave enough to dig deeper and start to explore the concept of home in relationship to our internal world instead of finding comfort in the perceived stability of the external, staying too long in these places or returning to them in search of home will never feel quite the same as it used to as once we start to surrender to our hearts desire for evolution and expansion. Here, the inevitable process of allowing the falling away of all that is comfortable and familiar to create space for something new begins and we enter the unknown.

When we know where we’ve been but don’t quite yet know where we’re going, it can be one of the most uncomfortable places to be but a very good sign that we’re on the right path if we can just surrender to the process. Sometimes it’s easier said than done, but those who are brave enough to dance there in the magic dark will with no doubt find their sense of place, once again.

After all, home isn’t found in another. It’s you reflected in another. And if this next chapter is a reflection of anything I’m to become, I’m all in.

On Love

“You have no idea how hard I've looked for a gift to bring You. Nothing seemed right. What's the point of bringing gold to the gold mine, or water to the ocean. Everything I came up with was like taking spices to the Orient. It's no good giving my heart and my soul because you already have these. So I've brought you a mirror. Look at yourself and remember me.” - Rumi

Not too long ago, a deeper understanding of love was presented to me in least expected of ways from a bouncer as he stopped to mark my hand on the way out the door of a bar.

As he grabbed my hand again as if to go back and correct something, I assumed it was a giant X and didn’t bother to look down, instead carrying on my conversation and laughing to a friend because the whole thing had made me feel like I was seventeen again and underage. When I got back to our table, what I realized in that moment that what he had drawn wasn’t an X, it was a heart and where he had stopped to correct himself was to complete a line where the bottom edge was broken. Quite a bit like my own at the time.

At an appropriate time for my own state of reflection on love, I gazed down at this symbolic piece of artwork I had been temporarily tattooed with for the evening and it struck me, that to some this would be seen as messy heart, if even a heart at all. But to me, it was beautifully symbolic, if not perfect, because I realized he had cared enough to go back to fix it.

In that moment, a realization that Love, a transformative force just like life and art found in the lines that complete a heart on the back of my hand, is what we make it to be in our own reality.

At times in my life I have been brought to my knees in grief about how Love can become so lost as each offer different expressions of it and in doing so, trigger it’s opposing force - fear - as we navigate surrendering to the complete loss of control of how our unique iteration may or may not be received. Our hearts break as we get lost in translation between different iterations of love, forgetting that it is one language that is universal and ever present, even if it’s not completely understood.

In this, an understanding that we can only meet another as deeply as we’ve met ourselves. Sometimes we are fortunate enough to journey alongside someone to those murky depths as we find our way back home.

When love arrives in the eyes of another, it just a remembrance of who we truly are - mirroring back to us what we already know exists inside of us. If we feel safe enough to surrender, we greet that remembrance by arriving fully, surrendering to what is and will be without knowing the outcome. Or, in attempt to control, we take our figurative foot off the gas and stall or crash head on - unable to sustain the truth of seeing ourselves reflected so clearly in the other.

When the experience of Love arrives it can be too much too soon, or much too late. Rarely, it’s right on time.

But Love as a constant exists ever present in the ethers and all around us, when we choose to see it.

Love is everywhere and nowhere,

Everything and nothing,

All at once.

On Desire

At the beginning of the year, I wrote something that seemed to resonate with many people about the path I’ve chosen, and how choices have been a big part of the process in the unfolding of that path in a certain direction.

If I dig a little further into my intention, it was to share my journey in hopes to inspire others to give themselves permission to go after what they desire. It was about encouragement to make choices inspired by our heart’s longing, to follow what lights us up and makes us feel alive. Acknowledging that making choices in alignment with our truth is empowering, complex and sometimes difficult, but it’s the most courageous thing we can do to truly give ourselves the chance to create a life that truly feels like our own - connected with our heart…and that blossomed into becoming the retreat in Sicily this summer, Embodying the Heart.

Through dialogue, inspired movement and guided self-inquiry on the retreat, exploring the experience of Desire is anchored as the first step on the journey towards Embodying the Heart. I’ve been sitting with it a lot lately, figuring out what I have to say about it and what Desire even means to me. To be honest, it’s been the most elusive experience to sum up, as Desire is often conditioned by our society to be layered with guilt or shame - shouldn’t we all just be happy with where we are at, keep it quiet and be sure not to stir the pot too much after all? But within contentment also lies the unavoidable pull evolution that is life. To ignore that pull of Desire is to ignore life itself.

When dropping into the heart, the truth about Desire is that it is an experience that allows us to expand from our current state. Desire is the initial creative spark in the inevitable unfolding of a journey - to live, love, create, transform, evolve, express, actualize…to be. And so far, here is what I know to be true: just because we Desire something, a certain direction, way of being or experience, doesn’t mean it will work out as we thought it would. There is no destination to be achieved from Desire, it’s simply what ushers us forward, into the unknown…

Into life itself.

On Luck

Seven years ago I woke up on the other side of the world for the first time completely untethered from the life I knew on the opposite side. Days later I was in the back of a tuk tuk barreling down a road passing through rice fields somewhere in central Thailand when I felt with every cell of my body that I was free in a way that I had never felt before - a moment in which I realized that the experience of my life surrounding me finally matched the fire that burned so wildly inside of me. I haven’t looked back since.

As I’ve dodged freezing winters and now a world seemingly flipped upside down, I’ve heard people say that I’m lucky. I will tell you that in all my gratitude for this life - luck doesn’t have much to do with it. It’s more so been a series of choices. Each one was made with a deep commitment to create a life that is a reflection of how I hope to spend my time here on this planet.

This life is flowing, ever changing, taking shape to whatever form may hold it, transforming from the ebbs and flows of experiences both light and dark. It can become all encompassing and confronting for anyone who has experienced life wholly based on inherent stability, predictability and logic - those qualities won’t save you when you choose to live from your heart.

As I continue to walk this road I have a deep sense of gratitude for the internal strength I’ve cultivated to continue to make choices that bring me into deeper alignment with who I am and what I hope to create as the highest declaration of what I believe to be a life well lived.

The way we live our lives can be our greatest form of expression. It can be our biggest protest and it’s our deepest responsibility, now more than ever, to create our worlds around what is in alignment with our hearts and our truth. Choose boldly. Choose what makes you feel alive. Choose what brings you back home to yourself. Choose what makes you feel that tuk tuk kind of free…whatever that means to you.

I Found Myself Again…

On an outgoing tide, with my belly on the sand like a mermaid, picking shells out of ancient rock pools and smearing mud on my face, childlike, enveloped in saltwater and surrounded by people I’ve come love that are choosing the same life I am.

They are here in this place with me as the sun drops low on the horizon and glows orange in the distance, making the surface of the ocean appear iridescent, like the scales of a fish. With each sunset it becomes easier to hear my answer when I ask myself what more is there to want than the peace that comes with this kind of existence.

I never knew I’d find that part of me here…

But life is full of surprises…isn’t it.

One Year, Here.

One year here…

Watching the way the afternoon light hits my porch as it breaks through the trees and passes through the cream colored macrame fringe of my hammock,

Smelling the mixture of sand and dried salt warmed by the sun with a hint of cheap detergent that has made its way into every piece of clothing I own,

Feeling the soles of my feet hardened from walking barefoot everywhere - even into the supermarket where I stack mangos and coconuts in withered and dusty cardboard boxes instead of plastic bags,

Arriving home each night to the stars framed by jurassic palms to light candles held by the necks of wine bottles with labels that seem so far away from here against the pitch black night,

Drifting to sleep with the sound of the waves and waking up to the same rhythm as my skin is wrapped in crisp morning air that warms as the sun slowly slips above the mountain to give me another day here.

I never imagined how this place would keep me and cradle me.

One year, here.