Connecting to home

As I crossed the border from South Dakota to Minnesota, the place I had spent my youth, at first, the landscape appeared to me only as familiar as a song once heard in infancy. Although only two summers had passed without a visit (but with a visit each winter), the land resonated with me as something new. In that time away, home had become an interesting concept. With a long moment in the finger lakes region of NY, a short stint in the berkshires, three months in the tropical rain forests of Costa Rica, my logical "home base" remained the temperate rain forests of the Pacific Northwest, and my heart was at home with my partner out east. After all the adventure, upon returning to Minnesota, the flat terrain and short, rounded, deciduous trees had become new again.

Life promises to ebb and flow with its experiences. Events and patterns appear in a cyclical fashion; when one extreme of any duality is reached, its opposite will soon follow. In this moment in my life, there is an explosion of movement. So far in 2010, I have set up camp in three cities in three different states (all which just so happen to border Canada). I appreciate this time in the cycle, mostly, as it quenches a craving for travel I have yearned for. Perhaps it was made easy by Olympia's transient-friendly nature. Living in Olympia, it's almost expected that you will leave and come back. All the details, like finding short-term subleasers, seem to work themselves out without much effort. Other times, the excitement is a bit exhausting. In the past year, planning for the next journey began shortly after arriving at a new destination, as I was traveling via. independent projects, and deadlines for paperwork would not wait! Overall, though, it has led me to find within myself a sense of stillness within the movement. Wherever I go, I am home, as my body houses my spirit.

In my wanderings I have noticed the tendency for the mind to grasp on to landscape, call it home, and identify with it. This observation first came to me five years ago as I memorized the latin names and medicinal uses of native Northwest plants. Hiking the trails became akin to visiting old friends (the plants). Every time, like a woman throwing her bags down on the kitchen table after a long day of work, something inside would surrender to the peace of it all. Those forests became home. A visit to Minnesota a year after moving away gave me the first taste of having found a new home out west; the trees looked so small and the forest floor so dry! What was "home" for most my life was now being compared to some other point of reference.

With every new place, until there is some sense of familiarity with the natural world, I am still just a visitor. Once plant books have been studied, and the nearby paths have been explored, however, the land moves into that space inside reserved for "home." No matter how comfortable I get in my own skin, there is always a hunger to include the natural world in my definition of "home."