Being Home And Being Yourself
About meaning, and belonging, and rest and care…after a lifetime of running away.
Where will you find home…
Now that, yet again, you have moved away?
In the boxes stacked up in the corners of your mind?
In the straining awnings of false pretenses
That you disguised as your martyred self?
Do you think you could ever make your way back home again,
After years and years of bleating on
About how you could barely survive
The mundane regular-ness of life?
Not having tasted the essence of your own waters
How do you expect to be a safe harbour?
For yourself…
Your desires…
Your poor mis-guided self.
Now the tide is low and your heartbeats are ebbing…
Do you think you could live without ever finding your shore?
You say you would rather sink or swim
Than anchor in unknown waters.
But is it really so unknown when…
You high-tailed at the first sniff of a smoke
And short-changed rising waves for mere quarters?
Where will you keep your dreams?
And your hurts?
And your many flights of fancy?
Where would you anchor them? With whom?
Where will you find the warm hearth
That will keep your soul safe? And keep it from bursting into smithereens?
After all… isn’t that your greatest dream?
To stay intact. And whole.
And to paint your face in smiling glories?
Where will you come back to
When tired and cracked from all that life had to teach
Where will you store these lessons? Air them out?
Under whose safe-keeping? Which silver-lined cloud?
Where do you think your fears live now?
This anger? The resentment? The pain? The guilt?
What do you think it is rooted in,
If not in your idea of home?
Where do you think everything that you want
And need, and covet, and discard comes from?
Where will you go when no one remembers your name?
Or worse… Hears your name and turns away?
Then, would you re-build again?
As you do every couple or so years now?
Shedding the skins of your peers… Drowning in tears…
And bravely dither away yet again?
What will you make of what ever there may be left?
How would you come back
To where you never wanted to stay?
Does home mean four walls and a big empty bed?
Or does it bring meaning, and belonging, and rest and care?
It’s time to come home now…
It’s time to live as a home to yourself.
To your skin and bones, and blanketed breaths.
They are the first home you ran away from,
And the only real home you will ever know.
All the thoughts that make up your mind…
Of being safe and sturdy, and gentle and kind.
They are you, your home, your own lost hope.
Take that as it may….
Once you become a home to yourself
Only then can you be a home someone else
After a lifetime of always running away.
