‘I long, as does every human being, to be at home wherever I find myself’.
Maya Angelou
For an eternity it seemed like I had no place I really felt at home (sound familiar?). A friend’s mother once commented that she had more entries in her address book for me than anyone else in her life. I have moved more times than I can actually remember now and at each place of residence, I have made myself as comfortable as I could. Having not actually enjoyed my early years, nor living in the cramped conditions of my teenage years, I was glad to fly the nest at nineteen. As I moved from one place to the next, I suppose I was unconsciously looking for that hangout we call home; a place to feel comforted, a place of nurturing and peace.
In all that searching, as in a dream where we are running but never quite reach our destination, all I found was somewhere else to live, but it was not home! I asked a longstanding friend, did they ever really feel at home anywhere, or like me did they feel like a guest just passing through? Yes, it would seem, I was not alone in this eternal search.
So where was I to find the magical, yet elusive place called home? Perhaps I was in the wrong country. Perhaps I was looking in all the wrong places, many of which were shared accommodation in the early years, and then on occasion over the years I would get to have my own space. Did this feel any more like home? No! This perplexed me, I could come and go as I pleased, have the place set up as I would like it, get up as early as I wished, play music whenever the fancy took me, yet it was still not the magical place I sought. Where else must I look? I shared some living spaces with partners, still the longing for home endured.
Then one day, out of the blue, after twenty-five years of meditation, reading endless books on spirituality, philosophy, dare I say it self-help, Buddhism, mysticism, ecology, the list is almost endless, I woke up and found myself to be at home. Home in a way that I could have never predicted or imagined for myself, even if I had tried. I had finally arrived at the magical land of home without a shadow of a doubt; I had assuredly disembarked and hit dry land. And where was this enchanting place? Right inside, where it had been all along. As the fourteenth century poet Rumi once wrote: ‘Wherever you stand, be the soul of that place’.
A long chain of events lead me to be at a time and place in my life, where I had a question, and life seemed ready to answer it. At the end of a relationship break up where I had lost both my partner and her beautiful five and half year old daughter, amidst the chaos of this wreckage I had been given the gift of unconditional love and had learnt so much from the child that shared it with me that I was at a loss as to what to do with it. I felt almost overwhelmed by the enormity and volcanic impulsion of energy it brought to me. I made a personal decree to myself that I must, above all else, find a way to give this legacy back to the world to as many people as I could. Yet, how would I achieve such a colossal and prodigious task?
The very thing that woke me up was also the answer to my question. Coming to an understanding of the three spiritual Principles of Mind, Consciousness and Thought, led directly to the deepest sense of home I had ever experienced, as my dear friend Dicken Bettinger put it recently: “We are all like turtles. We take our home with us wherever we go!” This experience also showed me how it would be possible to go out into the world and give that gift of unconditional love back to everyone and anyone who would listen.
Now I find myself, many years later in the privileged position of being able to spend time working with individuals, couples, families and groups of people, all who like us, seek the comfort that we now enjoy in coming home to, as Sydney Banks put it: “living the best life ever”. In fact the title of this blog is the result of working with an amazingly resilient individual who continues to unfalteringly move towards that homeward bound journey. For each and every one of us, it is only a matter of not time, but an individual moment, where we see through the illusion that we were ever lost in the first place.
It is in this place; where there is no separation between the form of this world and the formless spiritual nature of life, that we find a beautiful synergy of existence. Where we return to the abode we have searched for all these long years. We have come home to ourselves, and nothing in this world can take away the magic and miraculous beauty that we find within. Now we are safely ensconced and snuggled up in the warmth, it is time to spread out our good feelings and hold up the bright lantern of hope, so that others may find their way through the dark to the magical land of home.
