Who are you when you are away from home?
Do you feel like you carry yourself intact – your own little bubble bouncing within the big blue marble – wherever you are? Or do you feel the edges start to blur and shift as they tend to when you are picking your way through an unknown forest, senses alive and prickling?
I have been away from Provence – and from Remi and the dogs – since May 28th. My Mom took time off to be with me for a week and we all helped my Sister move into a beautiful new home. During those busy days, filled with action and movement, I strode forth as Heather Who Lives in France, carried by the song of my life there. But now my Mom and Sister have gone back to their normal schedules and I am spending quite a bit of time alone.
Already, I have found the ground to be a bit slippery underfoot. The tune of “Who I Am” is slowing down and in the quiet of this undefined environment, certain notes are hanging off the bottom of the scale. I don’t particularly mind.
When Remi and I were travelling for our work, I came to relish that stripping down process. The rich simplicity of directly and continually encountering something new. There is usually little room for the noise in our personalities during such experiences.
Here too I see how malleable I am. To pick me up and put me down somewhere else, amidst other loves and interests feels like an opportunity, not only to express other aspects of who I can be – such as being literally and culturally understood – but within the remove of my daily definitions to remember the core of my heart.
Step by step, I crunch across the leaves, I lift my legs over the fallen branches and rise up on tip-toe to try and take in the view.
Even within such seeming stillness, much is happening…
Away from home? Another blogger and I were talking about the elderly in nursing homes who ask/beg relatives to take them 'home'. We wondered which home they are talking about? I wondered which home I will call for? Is the home we call for our true home? Your photos seem to show you are at home in the forest/natural landscape/ the theatre of nature.
Unmoored. What a great word Suze used. When I lived in South America, I often longed for home. But when I was in Canada, I was not entirely at home, either. Isak Dinesen wrote that she longed for a place where she was completely at home. We find that after time, then when we cast off from the mooring, there's a sense of being adrift, floating, not quite comfortable, but very aware of possibility.
Magnificent images, love.
I read the back cover of a memoir yesterday in which the author, a woman called Kristen, writes from the perspective of Kristin-Adjacent when she travels–essentially an unmoored version on herself.
You are experiencing Heather-Adjacent. She seems, essentially, just as much an aesthete (among the most noble things a person can be, to my way of thinking) as Heather Who Lives in France.
I've travelled to places where my soul feels at home, as if it had been there before – even though physically, it hadn't. And then I go to other places that feel alien to me no matter how many times I visit. I am afraid the US is one of those places 🙁 I really feel like a stranger in a strange land there and I don't know why that is. Maybe because I personally have no roots there.
Dear Heather,
My father emigrated to Venezuela during the fifties in search for a better life and stayed there for twelve years. Before leaving Italy he was a mariner in Naples Harbour and travelled a lot. He went back to Italy in the early sixties because of the political situation of that country but he never stopped to love traveling and transmitted his passion at me and my sister. It is thanks to him that I left Italy for Great Britain and France alone, to learn new languages and "new worlds" as he used to say. My travel experiences have changed my life for ever. I realized that I could live on my own, interact with other people in different settings, expand my horizons. The inner part of myself came out to life. I was different everything was different to me from that moment.
Yes, I truly think that traveling is not only "an opportunity to express other aspects of who we can be but to remember the core of our hearts".
Dear Heather,
Today is my birthday, you're in America,and you STILL haven't telephoned me.
I don't know if I'm going to be able to get over this wound that you haveinflicted upon me, particularly given the degree to which I have, over all these years, completely exhausted my energies, time, and financial/emotional resources in support of you and your blog.
I can't believe (but I supose I HAVE to do so) that you would forget my birthday. I can't express how much this hurts…..right here and right now.
Yours in sudden, but unavoidably inescapable sorrow……
Uncle David
http://www.davidterryart.com
I doubt it as your image of the butterflies is spot on! We embrace the differences as we can and yet it is so exciting…and for me at times I am scared before I go of how I will feel…
This is just incredibly beautiful. Thank you. I know I will think of it often. Freedom is so precious to me.
I, too, know this feeling. It is strange, and moving. But I am 14 months away from the last time I experienced this in my old home, New England. I usually have butterflies in my stomach throughout my visit, too. I've never been able to figure that, but it's strange and welcomed at the same time. You've described it more beautifully than I ever could.
Good question. Its wonderful to read the way you look at life.
For some strange unknown reason, At O'Hare, every time I stepped off the plane I felt new no matter how tired, cranky or blah I actually was. Its been almost 40 years since I've been there. I think a lot has changed except the exhilarating memory of knowing I could go as far as my money could take me. The airport was like the umbilical cord to Earth…and there I was born. From that experience, I know that who I am, wherever I am, depends on how well I can sense that feeling of freedom.