Homecoming

I attended my first ever writers retreat on the weekend (I know!) and this is one of the pieces that came out. The prompt was ‘home’. We had ten minutes. Here it is exactly as it came out.

I am most at home when I am in beauty.

This is not about walls or décor or even the people I share my space with but instead a sense of pause. Home is the place within where I find the nothing part of me that is simply content to breathe out and feel no urgency or regret.

Home is in a blade of grass outside under a random sky – where I am not molded to fit a chair or required to place my cup just so.

Home is a freedom that puts aside expectation and removes the boundary of my body.

At home I have no skin. My bones are the rivers of the earth and my flesh is food – the degenerating leaf litter than nourishes the forest floor so that tiny fronds of fern can unfurl from their homes.

My home is as vast as I am, not anchored to location, not repeatable or able to be captured in a painting. At this home I am the invitation, not a guest, not a place but an idea, an expression, a gathering of those things close my soul.

I cannot leave my home and the winds blow the curtains at my window even when I am absent. Outside, my place of worship–of writing, I look to a horizon the curves across the contours of my skin. Home believes in herself, and as I close my eyes I can feel the embrace of a thousand trees. I have travelled in ever smaller circles to find this home and in this desire to stop moving, home has covered my eyes, touched my forehead as a mother does and said ‘enough’.