Home Can Be A Tower

I'm thinking a lot about home, and what home means to us. We moved our family to a medieval tower in 1988: it was the beginning of a long series of adventures, some cool and exciting, others devastating and dangerous. I pulled the Tower card this morning for my reading, which can mean change in a fundamental way. It can mean the destruction of one home and the creation of another. It can signal the breaking down of old habits and patterns to make way for new: an eruption, a revolution.

I work alongside women who are thinking deeply about how they want to give birth. Most of them want to birth at home, and many of them do. Last week, one of the women I have been working with over the summer gave birth at home, peacefully, in her place, with her partner alongside her. She came back to the city from abroad because she felt the need to give birth "at home". She didn't just mean in her own apartment, on her own bed. She meant "in her home". She missed the smells of her city; the bicycles; the streets and trees of the place she knew - she knows - as her own home.

When I am invited to accompany a woman during her reproductive experience, whether that is pregnancy, birth, miscarriage, abortion, infertility experiences, or the decision whether or not to have children, I try to facilitate a way that she can work her way back to her "home". We all have a centre place, a home, that we need to be able to return to. When we can't return, we get lost. We get lost in other peoples' needs and desires. We get lost in addictions. We get lost in our jobs. We get lost in cleaning up. We get lost in the search for money or new things. We get lost and then the Hungry Ghost finds us and we feel empty all the time, and hungry, and we don't even know what we are hungry for. But the answer is, we're missing our Home.

I've never felt I had a geographic home. I moved from one continent to the next all my life: Africa, North America, Europe. I love the Canadian Rockies. I feel at home when I'm on a trail. I love the desert. Give me temperatures at body temp or higher, and I'm happy. Then again, I love the challenge of a 20 k run in 20 below zero. 

But I wouldn't say I have a home, like, I don't feel "at home" anywhere. I am at home when I'm with any number of my five children and their spouses. I'm at home when I'm running a long distance. I'm at home ... when I'm on a plane, looking down at my planet.

I listen with awe to people who speak of missing their home, how they miss the taste of a place, or the feeling of the wind on their faces in their home place. My journey is different: because I've never felt the geographic pull of home, I seek to find my centre, and I accompany others on their own journeys to their centres. When a woman is birthing in her centre, she is birthing at home. When she gives birth in her power, at the centre of the event, she has found her home. My job is to navigate with her so she can find the path home. Sometimes there are huge prickly trees in front of the entranceway. Sometimes her home is very small, so small she can trip on it at night. Sometimes she needs to lose something in order to find her home. Sometimes she needs to let go of one place to journey to the other.

Peace.