Monarch butterflies need the warmth of southern lands to survive the winter, but the caterpillars which are their young depend on milkweed plants that thrive in more northern climates. And so they migrate as much as 2500 miles, seeking the dual homes that their lives depend on.
How might your sense of home be split between two or more locations?
Nature has many examples of the cycle of stillness, then form. As a human being, I find migration to be an inward flow of this somewhat same cycle: stillness within form. Meditation centers me as to what I am really about and what follows is a more beautiful form than what I can produce through untethered anxiety. Anxiety shows me when it is time to “cacoon”; calmness shows me when it is time to fly.
I very rarely feel that I have a permanent home. I’ve lived and traveled many places during my life time. Even those do not feel permanent. I rather admire the monarch butterfly for its audacity to travel great distances, be beautiful while in transit, cluster in community in Mexico, and afterward have its progeny return to an earlier site. Perhaps this is a message to us that the process of living is transitory.
I enjoyed my 21 years in Washington State and still feel close to the northwest. But I’m a native New Yorker and my ashes will end up in New York harbor. Big stretch between east and west, hard to reconcile.
hi Nikki, I understand your comment regarding the distance between our coasts. However, remember that the waters of the earth merge and some day part of you may well return to the Pacific in the West, where you have had some home-time.
I really feel sentimentally and physically at home in the decidous forests of New HAmpshire but my heart home is wherever my children are living-