Coming home
We belong to and are of the Earth but we bypass our sense of belonging. I missed this leaving home and my story mirrors our larger, human-wide journey. What do I need to come home?
Home
Norris, Montana, USA. January 2024. Think exposed, small highway, blink and you miss it town.
A dozen buildings and a gas station. For me, typical America and standing for a place:
- In which I consistently meet the most warm and welcoming people ever.
Real friendliness greets me as I walk into the gas station and this quickly becomes co-created empathy and care. I have a real sense of belonging despite being in the USA for just 6 nights and Norris for a highly transactional purpose, I’m paying for gas.
Leaving home
Pony, Montana, USA. June 2020. It is the height of covid uncertainty.
I’ve stayed as long as I can and there’s no way to extend my visa. I leave.
My wife (Kari) and I are in the midst of making Pony home. There are lengthy legalities for me to live in the USA and I ignore my distress, my home-loss state. I could have leaned into the not knowing, the wonder of what might come and honoured the painful reality that leaving at this point is making it hard to come back.
I don’t. Instead I just fall to pieces for a day taking the full 24 hours to pack one bag. I don’t reach into or under my uneasiness or look for what is deeper (I’m yielding to my fate). Nor do I ask for help.
Men! Am I that stereotypical?
Un-belonging
Far Western Isles, Scotland, November 2020. This is a liminal land, a place where time feels and is slow.
Landing in Scotland I am waiting to go back to the USA.
Nevertheless, I speed up my sense of belonging by walking extensively. However being with the land, and the extraordinary presence of people through this land, is not the same as being at ‘home’.
Living here is an experience of wild closeness to nature and wild physical distance from people (I doubled the population of my village when I moved here).
And did you spot it? Yes, I am bypassing myself by being connected with the land and not people. Ok it is covid (social distancing here is half a kilometre to the next person) yet I don’t realise how potent that isolation is.
Bypassing
Boirseam, Western Isles, Harris Scotland, March 2021. The floor drops, I’m lost.
Bypassing full connection is wound through this substack:
-
Leaving home in Montana and bypassing the depth of disruption I felt in myself.
-
Being in the remote wilds of Scotland’s islands, hiking it while bypassing the physical aloneness.
For me this is dramatic and it helps to catalyse the better part of a year on the floor.1
However, it is more than me. Everyone is of the world and humans are an intricate part of all humanity and ecosystems.
Even while we know this is true, the modern day world, the view of ourselves-humans as exceptional and solely-unique individuals is very, very sticky. That trips us up into privileging our individual parts and deprioritising collective knowing pieces.
Re-integrating
Vienna, Siófok, Langholm +. 2022-2023. Bringing home all of my parts is vital for me. It is for all of us.
Coming home and into a full sense of belonging to our planet and humanity feels like:
- Actively curating perceptual senses, facilitating more than just logic. E.g. 2.0Conceptual to Perceptual2
- Systems sensing letting us explore connections. E.g. A love and purpose story3
- Owning my story:
After Leaving Home (June 2020) I could not get
another visa for the USA and Kari was ill and could not travel. With much follow up and 3.5 years later, 20 December 2023 the very day after Kari dies, I finally hear from the US embassy.4
In the lead up I had stepped into embodying many of the parts of this, pieces that were left behind in Pony. In particular it is hard to shift anything while we ‘yield to our fate’. I physically, as an embodied practice, felt into what I needed, what was important, taking steps until I arrived in a sense of collective responsibility. Fully integrated it feels like a radiating sensation where I’m attracting and co-creating, e.g. with those responsible for the border decisions.5
By January 5, 2024 I have my visa and all the difficulties are shifted into peace and collaboration at the embassy interview.
Coming home
Pony, Montana, USA. January 2024. Quite surreal and simultaneously nourishing.
Being back in Pony is very very strange. It is an experience I left a lifetime ago. And it is timeless, a sense of being with myself, my previous life, in the now.
I feel very connected. And in a foreign country—just visiting and passing through.
I’m seeing and being with so many places that are intimately familiar. And alien, rediscovered.
I’m in a land I know so well, with people I love, on a ranch I’d been a big part of reforesting for silvopasture, carbon sequestration and resilience. In the mountains with so many byways and paths I’ve explored here.
On the seventh day, when I leave Pony, I do it deliberately. Three and a half years ago I didn’t recognise I was leaving home and left parts of myself behind. This time I deliberately leave ‘home’.
We’re all coming home
Earth, 2024. Consciously or unconsciously all humans are connecting with our planet.
Feeling like we are fully part of our world, belonging to our world will be very very strange. It feels:
- Like we are visiting and passing through. That is like I felt reconnecting into my old home in Pony.
- Easy and warm, so welcoming. It is like I felt recognising the American hospitality in Norris.
- That we are experiencing this as a state from our higher selves. That’s powerful integrating our old socialised and younger tethers. It is similar to what I felt when shifting into connection and peace with the visa process and people.
Practically, it is very possible to feel this. As a practice try Standstill.6 And/or feel into yourself and the sensations beyond you as you meditate on John O’Donohue’s homecoming poem7:
May all that is unforgiven in you,
Be released.May your fears yield
Their deepest tranquilities.May all that is unlived in you,
Blossom into a future,
Graced with love.
Let’s blossom into our future, re-integrating our sense of belonging to this planet and all humanity around us.
We are all made of this and from it.8
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Resources
Links and credits
I first wrote this article on my substack https://benevolution.substack.com
References
Substack series on this starts here: The rascals immunity
23 days with 500 people who are fostering formats and new understanding for us all to step up, to step into curating the conditions for a world in which it is worth living, worth living for all sentient species: 2.0 Conceptual to perceptual
These practices allow for collective multiple intelligences. In A love and purpose storyunderpinning the shift you will read about (towards the end) is when people actively connect with their power to meet the planetary, people and purpose needs of today. We can understand this as both metaphorical and empathetical/subtly with others.
Kari and I had completed in all the appropriate ways we could without being able to physically be with each other. Vale Kari 💙 is a taste of her extraordinary being and the many of us blessed to know her and love her.
Fundamental to this is Teresa Zimmermann
‘s core model. She and the model are a piece of beauty and ongoing deep insight I’m profoundly grateful for every day.
Embodiment practices (like the one described to get my visa) are a core of my work.
See Unfolding realities to explore this further and/or reach out simon (at) unfoldingrealities.com>
Please come along on this walk, a virtual walk, in Finland, Iceland and Scotland to Chalanais.
It is a walk along four paths—the physical, then collective systems, feelings and shared cultures. It is also a journey in time from the equinox to now, the solstice.
That’s a fifth path, a standstill. It has been this way for all of our lifetimes and for millennia. Play the video>.
As you read the first line let your senses of yourself expand into your peri-personal space. What do you feel? Across your skin? Above your skin? How far do these sensations extend? Do they have a color? A vibration? A temperature? How else might you describe them? Hold those feelings and reach into them. Now double the sensations. Now triple them. Read on and notice how the feelings change for you. Poem from To bless the space between us
Some Leonard Cohen to sing us there:
Going home without my burden
Going home behind the curtin
Going home without the costume that I wore
Credits
All pictures: Festina Lentívaldi, (be) Benevolution, reuse: Creative Commons BY-NC 3.0 US, except first picture, farm building near Norris, is from Wikimedia commons.
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