Ask Parvati 19: What Is Home? Part 3, Inner and Outer Home

 

WHAT IS HOME? PART 3: INNER AND OUTER HOME

(Continued from What Is Home? Part 2: Home In Meditation and Music)

 

 

If April is the cruelest month, then July is the most gracious. Out in my back garden, I look up to the canopy of leaves of a large maple tree that stands guardian at the back of my house. The sky that peeks through is cloudless and as blue and open as the sea. (Maybe this world is upside down and the ocean is really up there and the sky bordered with sand.)

 

The golden sunlight that shimmers through the fluttering leaves feels like the passing thoughts that trickle through my mind. The scent of the juniper bushes near my resting place is sweet, rich and moist. Water in the fountain splashes into the pond. The water flows like the continual, rhythmic flow of my breath. Birds and baby squirrels keep stopping by to check me out. We connect for a moment until they flutter off. Children’s voices, chirping birds, distant whizzing cars and my neighbour’s murmuring music create a symphony of sounds. This moment feels immense, vast and perfectly home.

 

When I was a child, I felt an inner restlessness. The voice within spoke of something more than what I saw brought others temporary happiness. I found joy in singing, through writing music and creating art. I felt alive in connecting with nature and communing with what I now simply call “the unseen”. I always had a sense that there was more than the material. I wanted to touch it, rest into it and be it – whatever that “it” was.

 

The church I went to called “it” God. To me “it” was everywhere, in the very fabric of life. I feel like it touched “it” and found in it a tremendous sense of home when I was recently in the Arctic traveling a few months ago to the North Pole. I went to sing at the top of the world to help raise awareness of the melting polar ice caps. There I also offered healing and prayers to the planet, our mother Earth, the vibrant living being that sustains us all, that is our home.

 

The feeling of singing at the top of the world remains impressed in me, like a tattoo on my soul. In the midst of the infinitely still desert of crystalline snow dusted over the icy ocean I stood upon, I felt as though the whole world was my home and an attentive audience, quietly listening. As I opened my arms, heart and throat to sing, I felt the world was in my body and I was the world. There was immense quiet, a profound presence and aliveness. The Inuit people I met en route seemed to embody that Arctic quiet wisdom. Being with them and traveling there ignited the spark of a baby Inuit in me. In the Arctic desert, I felt home.

 

I have been quite nomadic for most of my adult life - traveled a lot, seen the world, and enjoyed many varied cultures. As I have learned to “think turtle”, as my last blog discussed, I have learned how to find home wherever I may be, inspired by the turtle that carries its home on its back.

 

At first, home was literally my backpack in which I carried my necessities. But I have learned to put my pack down now and lessen the load I carry. Who is “doing” anyway? As my teacher says, when on a traveling train, why still hold onto your luggage? The train is my life, and I am carried by Life, supported by all that is. I let go.

 

We are in constant motion both metaphorically and literally as vibrant beings. I also move a lot as I travel to tour my music. Being so mobile, I learn to surrender to what is and to serve what is right in front of me. My sense of home now comes from my state of internal being. Not as attached to what is happening on the outside, I see life as receiving me. This moment, like a mother, is waiting at the family home door with open arms.

 

I have traveled outwardly through our colourful world. I have also traveled inwardly through my mind, heart and soul as I explore art and music, and as I develop through my spiritual practices. In some ways I could say that I have traveled both internal and external landscapes searching for a deeper meaning of home. Through loving, sharing, expressing and meditating, I have found a deeper, spiritual meaning of home, one that transcends geography and taps into the transpersonal and timeless, one that exists in the “vertical hour”.

 

(Continues tomorrow with What Is Home? Part 4: Home In The Vertical Hour)