Home, Candle Flame, Stars - and Finding A New Home

I love exploring wild landscapes, completely off the path, and have always been drawn to new landscapes, feeling unsettled in the places I’ve called home. Coming from a difficult family, I grew up mostly without places I could call my own, or wanted to stay.

In my mid-twenties, I had gone to college, done a yoga teacher training, and holed myself up for the winter in my family’s house after a parent’s death. With my remaining parent out during the day, it was quiet, especially on the days it snowed the most. I remember doing some yoga in the snow, wearing my warmest coat to really heat up and the bright contrast of the icy air.

Then curling up on a small half-couch with a cup of tea, writing and reading in that quiet warm space surrounded by snow. Looking out our sliding glass door at the snow piled up from the ground and piled on tree branches. Lighting beeswax candles and imagining my life.

That was the moment I remember feeling the most at home in the snow, and a memory I carry around with me; that winter I changed my name at new years, alone, and felt a bit of joy glowing and expanding like the candlelight in such a dark year.

I’ve felt at home exploring forests in the colorado mountains, lonely there with my family, and always been drawn to alien landscapes, inheriting my mom’s desire to visit Australia one day, where she was born.

I’ve learned since that I’m a creature of heat. Having grown up in the midwest, mostly slush outside of that moment, the grey of San Francisco, and a bit of New York City, I have continued to find, beyond hot yoga, that I thrive in heat. That candlelight has expanded to years of desert sun where the mountains begin in Colorado, and then in the valley of the sun in Phoenix, Arizona.

I’ve soaked it up. I’ve gotten jobs working in the summer heat, outside half the day in hundred-degree heat, and practiced circus arts in it, my heart beating, and skin drying faster than I sweat.

I’ve soaked up the sun day after day until I had my fill, and then worn hats and sunglasses. I’ve pushed my body to adjust for my jobs and training, drinking even more water, and going out in it even more. And I’ve learned to love swimming to a whole new weather in the heat, even when it heats up the water too.

Before all this, my childhood sanctuary was in the top of a sweetgum tree. I would stick a little cup of yogurt and a book into the waistband of my jeans after school and climb up to my favorite perch on a pair of branches. The star-leaves spread out below me like clouds, and in that quiet, I could follow the winding path of my thoughts more clearly. The way I’ve found since in float tanks, when I can really let myself drop in, feeling like I’m flying in the all the space of our galaxy, the way that it feels spread out across the sky on a moonless night in the wilderness.

That spot became my favorite through many things, my middle school shyness, my struggle to make friends in high school, a parent’s death, a lack of guidance. I would sneak out and climb up to my perch even at night, and during storms, especially during storms, winds and rain whipping me and shaking the tree back and forth. Flashes lighting up the sky from the horizon. I was taught to be afraid of those conditions, and I always counted for the thunder, but I couldn’t help but love it.

There in both the storms and the quiet sunny days, I could feel my hunger for life, my hunger for adventure, and that is what feels like home that I will carry with me.