Manifesting Home

What is home? According to the Wizard of Oz, it was at Auntie Em's farm house. Or was it the dimension/world where Auntie Em existed? I can say it was definitely the place that Dorothy failed to appreciate, fully, until it was gone. 

Is that always true? Is it possible to leave home behind? Can you choose where it is? What if you’ve never had a place to call home? What if you always had one but don't remember?

My earliest memories of a place I called home was a townhome, either in Minnesota or Texas. I don't really know if the memories are real or if they are a composite of oral recollections form my parents and home videos. The mind is funny that way, whatever story "runs" continuously becomes the truth. This can be comforting but dangerous in the unexamined life. 

I am pondering the possibility that "true home" for everyone is in the cradle of creation. The place that is pure love and light. For most this place is hard to grasp. So let's start in a place we can all understand, a mother's womb. 

Close your eyes and imagine. Light absent, warm, quiet, soothing vibration of what you cannot see. 

    > Then, in a moment, sound. A faint rhythm of what you would one day associate to a heart, a drum. Always present, sometimes faster, sometimes slower, omnipresent, omnipotent. 

    > Then, in another moment, light. Shadows, light moving behind what you would realize later are your eyelids. Colors you would come to know as red, orange, black and grey.

    > There is only one feeling, warmth. Floating. 

    > The only feelings you know are your mother's. There is no separation, she is you, you are her. You feel the vibrations of her voice in joy and sorrow. You feel the bounce of her laughter and the sobs of her tears. 

    > You feel the nourishment of her self-care or the poison from her numbing her pain. You are her, she is you… until you are not. 

Pressure… Push… Squeeze… the drum beats harder or faster and both. Pressure… Push… Squeeze… Yells… Screams… Harder… Squeeze… Push and then cold. 

It no wonder that babies cry. All at once the perfect temperature, constant drum and meditation end. That first breath must burn as air inflates the lungs. For the first time noise of people and machines assault the senses. For the first time limbs are free to move outside of the constant caress. For the first time, you become separate. For some this is the first time experiencing fear, discomfort or pain. For many, this reinforces what they already know through their mother's energy. Either you are taught that negative energy is a subtle part of life or it is reinforced as something this new life need stop be prepared to endure. I believe most are somewhere on the spectrum  between. 

When I was born I was black, blue and green from bruising. My umbilical cord was a noose, and a blindfold, of my own making. I had twisted and turned so it was wrapped around my head, neck and shoulders again and again.  I was slowly suffocating. My mother tells the story of her doctor concerned with my lack of movement and deciding to induce labor early. If I would have been born full term, I would likely have died before emerging into the world. Those pictures from my first hours of life are not of a beautiful pink and tan baby. My father recently told me that I looked like a little racoon because of the bruising around my eyes. I am not lucky to be alive, I am blessed to have been chosen to live. My parents tell the story of how I was born an ugly duckling and grew into a beautiful swan. 

Does my beginning, wrought with pain and suffering, mean that my life was, has or will be more of the same? No. So can a womb really be my original home? Maybe, maybe not. 

What if I go back further? Back before I became a fertilized egg. Back before I was a sperm and an egg traveling toward each other. Back before atoms fused together to make that simple stem cell. As my mother said, "before you were even a twinkle in my eye." 

Home is inside every cell of being. Home is the divine energy that causes the ion exchange at a cellular level, binding us into one. Home is in every rung of DNA, those written instructions of potential, not destiny. 

I challenge you to dig deep, while sitting in the quiet and figure out what home you are anchored in. People and things are temporary. If you are anchored there, life will always be off balance. I have experienced the trouble of grounding home in a house.

I cried, off and on, for three days when my parents sold the home I knew from age three. I was in my mid-twenties when I had to let go. I still dream about Mission Road, the yard, the oak trees, the laundry room that would flood, the crab apple tree I would sway in like a ship's crow's nest, the smell of the lilacs in the spring. I thank them for selling that beautiful, flawed, house we called home. Because of that release, I have had to find a new anchor. 

I have landed in my spirit which moves and sways like a pendulum connected to my heart. I am grounded, connected. That pendulum, a magnet to the earth below me. However, my feet are the only part of me that touches the ground. I am not rooted like a tree because my spirit is free like the bird that is the animal of my spirit. 

As Alice Merton sings, "I have no roots, for my home was never on the ground." My home is in flight, just as that omnipresent omnipotent divine Christ spark is. My home will always be… because it is all that is