Over the last few months, enfleshed co-directors, Anna, Robert, and M, have been mulling over and sitting with the concept of ‘home’ – its complications and complexities, invitations and possibilities. Once a month for the next six months, we’ll be sharing our wonderings and explorations, and inviting you to consider your own relationship to what home is and isn’t, feels like, could be, and calls us to practice.
essay 1 – by m jade kaiser
“I have been practicing how to surrender the concept of a final state of a bodymindspirit that is ‘whole,’ or ‘healed,’ ‘uncomplicated’ or ‘entirely well,’’ aiming instead to practice listening, and loving, and paying respectful attention to all that is aching to live. Surrendering expectations of relationships that align seamlessly, movements that ‘get it all right,’ philosophies with all the answers, or gods of perfect resolutions. Surrendering, too, the cold demands of an elusive worth – mine or others – attained through perfection, proof, or productivity. There are so many sacred offerings in the present, this present, beckoning us, welcoming us, inviting us to encounter the journey as home.”
essay 2 – by Robert Monson
“Those ones who you have come to love, and they have come to love you back. It is a beautiful work to behold. Watching love and safety spring up. When I was younger, a friend used to tell me often, “I love you on purpose.” This was such an odd and overwhelming sentiment. During these years, at war with myself, anxious, and dealing with compounded trauma someone loving me on purpose meant the world to me. How healing to hear that someone was intentionally loving on me.”
essay 3 – by anna blaedel
“More recently, I heard the herbalist Rosemary Gladstar say, ‘Plants have no choice oftentimes in where they land, and yet wherever they land they are going to thrive and grow the best they can.’ I came to know home as freedom to grow, thriving and growing wherever I land, the best I can. Turtle-like, we can carry home with us; wildflower-like, we can find or make home wherever we land.”
essay 4 – by m jade kaiser
“We human animals know how complicated it can be – deciding amidst struggle when to leave home or when to stay. Not everyone gets a choice, one way or another. And those who do, don’t all go or stay with the same resources. Like our creaturely kin, for many of us, in making such decisions, we weigh what makes a home ‘home’ through some of our most innate longings: For Safety. Belonging. Lineage. Pleasure. Connection to the land. Familiarity. Community. Resources. Joy. We can wrestle: Is home still possible here? Or must we seek home elsewhere?”
essay 5 – by robert monson
“I have learned that though the world frightens me, and will roar at me to be productive, to deny my feelings, to be a commodity…there is a rest for me. I have recently thought to myself that all of these mornings mean something. That in my attempts to steady myself I have been making a home for myself. Internally. In the parts of me that nobody else can see.”
essay 6 – by anna blaedel
“We build nests, and we dream of the hatchlings that will one day fill them. We find ourselves in empty nests, through loss or violence or choice or the natural order of things. We fall from nests, and are pushed out of them. When we are lucky, and blessed, we may find ourselves gently returned to nests we were not ready to leave. And, sometimes we are not. And, sometimes we do not survive. But sometimes, despite extraordinary odds, and no shortage of predators, we do.“
We want to hear from you! Share your thoughts on home below in a word, phrase, or poem, or blessing below.
