Home

My heart belongs to a million places and none. It flies freely across oceans and continents nestling warmly among recognisable faces and places. How did I get so bittersweet lucky? Most people have their home and loved ones within arms-reach, there to see, to touch, to speak with. Where they call home a familiar place they have always known, a place they were raised and will raise their children.

My home is a million places and none. I travelled for years searching before I realised that home was within me and everywhere. That like a turtle I carried my home with me and was free from the constraints of place or time. I grew up on the move yet failed to see home was not a permanent or fixed place. But a feeling.

My home resides with my heart in a million places and none. In the safekeeping of family and friends I am blessed to know and who, no matter the space or time between us, are ever present rocks in my life. It could be days, weeks, months or years but the certainty of their love remains.

My heart belongs to Perth. The beautiful west coast of Australia, its shorelines, its wide river, its sandy grounds and red earthed interior that forever stains your shoes and your soul. To a sun that sets into the ocean, to the smell of eucalyptus after rain in the south west, to salty winds and hot blowing easterlies, to dusks humming with the heat of a long summer’s day. To its homely country-town feel and its isolation, to its open spaces and that wide expanding blue sky, that makes you feel as though you’re at the edge of the world as it arcs towards the ocean. It belongs to my family and friends who I left there. To the history we share, our lives entwined in the tapestries of our stories.  

My heart belongs to Ireland. Its 40 shades of green. Its rolling hills and misty days, its craic and friendly faces. It belongs to those small towns I walked into and felt at home. It belongs to those people who embraced me, blood or not, who told me I was one of their own. Who raised me up and saw in me what I couldn’t see myself and overwhelmed me with their kindness and their love. Those people who had a faith in me that I’d lost in myself. Who saw me at my worst but knew me for my best. It belongs to the paths my ancestors walked before me, to their histories and stories, their journey that has led me to my own. It belongs to the music that sings to your soul and makes you weep with a melancholy joy you neither understand nor try to. It belongs to a spirit of a people known the world over, and it belongs to that feeling I get, that lump in the throat, when I try to explain what it means to belong to them.  

My heart belongs to the countries and cities and towns where my people reside. To their roaming, and their journeys, and their paths that crisscross back across mine, across the years but somehow hold steady in the light of our friendship. A friendship secure in something that doesn't require an explanation. It just is. A shared understanding that we’re dancing to the same tune and speaking the same language. The bittersweet reality that while our hearts are connected our lives will be spent mostly apart.

My heart belongs to the places I’ve been. Those places I know like the back of my hand, those places I travelled alone, those places I travelled together. Those places that made me feel deeply human, deeply vulnerable and deeply connected. A whisper of life that hinted I was part of something far bigger than myself. Those places that reminded me of how small and insignificant I was, and made me feel more alive and present for knowing it.

My heart belongs to the ocean. The place it all begins and the place it will all end. That ancient mother of all life. The place I hear if I close my eyes and listen hard enough, no matter how far from her I am. She soothes my soul and quiets my mind in a way that nothing else can. She grounds me and reminds me of my purpose in the world and my responsibility to protect her. She is peaceful and violent. Nurturing and destructive. The yin and yang of all life. A fine balance.

My heart belongs to a million places and none. It belongs to every landscape, every sunset and sunrise, every wave and grain of sand. It belongs to the wind that carries my love to those across so many shores. For so many years I searched for home, for where I would belong. And in all that time, had I opened my eyes, I would have seen that my home and my heart were right in front of me.     

S x