Going Home

1 year ago today I wrote…

It feels surreal, to be sitting on a jet plane, don’t known when I’ll be back again. This time for real. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve headed out on a trip, bound for a plan and singing that song to someone as I head out the door. This was no different. Tears glistened on eyes, as ever. No goodbyes, only see you again. All my trips in the past have come with a return ticket or knowing that I’ll book one within a few weeks. I truly have no idea this time. Mother Bali is not finished with me. This is more than a trip. This is going home.

When I was a child, I called Blackfoot home. Home was to be near family. Home was the mountains. Home was Idaho. My parents took me all over Idaho and I loved her. She taught me to be one with nature. She gave me a love of looking up at the star dusted night sky. She held me in her warm springs and pushed me up her rocky peaks. She is full of tradition. She is horseback riding, fireworks, bars, churches, neighbors, and family. I have lived most of my life in Idaho. Yet, she is not home.

I spent a year in Phoenix, Arizona. What an adventure. Hell on earth. Don’t take offense, Arizonans. I love Phoenix. I made some incredible friends there. I remember noticing how pleasant the people who live there are. I estimated that you would have to be such an easy going person to tolerate the extreme heat. He’s a dusty city, full of life. Phoenix was a short lived home, but it was a welcoming one while I was there and I have so much love for the people who welcomed me into their homes while I lived there.

New York! Ah, New York. I love New York. As I try and consider a gender for them, I’m lost because New York is everything. They are everything! New York will run you into the ground or push you to the sky. It is a city of dreamers and hustlers. It is where all life comes to coexist. It can be a compassionate city and it can be a brutal city. It can feed your ambition or beat you down. I would say I had a healthy dose of all of New York while I lived there. I ran to them with my dreams high. I felt I was ready for them. They were ready for me. I crashed and burned, the Phoenix soaring there, to be reborn into a whole new incarnation of a strong songbird with the power to heal. New York was full of vibrant people and fast connections. I hope I can maintain many of them. I love the people I’ve met there dearly. Time will tell.

I’ve visited many other communities and made many other connections across the world. My heart has touched the opposite ends of the earth and my heart has been touched by people from all around.

In all of my travels and moves, I think I’ve ever been searching. I’ve been trying to find my home, the hearth for my heart. You know the saying, “Home is where the heart is.” It is ever true and my heart is with Mother Bali, so my home is with Mother Bali as well. I look forward to welcoming you into my new home.

A year later…

It’s a year to the day that I moved to Bali, dreamy with synchronicity, the jet-lane leaving at 11am on 1/11, I took all my worldly possessions, two suitcases, a backpack and my ukulele and headed for an island that called me there. I love her so deeply. She has taught me so much. She has shown me that there are people who are like me, who live with wild, open hearts and they all congregate there. They all come together in a beautiful mosh pit of cultures and beliefs that mingle in the most peaceful co-existence I’ve experienced yet. It feels like heaven on earth.

I claimed Bali as my home a year ago, and the second I arrived she was already ushering me onward. I say onward, but it’s also a return, a return to the place I was born.

I wrote a beautiful song the second week I was in Bali. The smells, sounds, feel of the air, and overall ambiance called me back to the place I grew up. Gray’s Lake.

There’s a place I used to go

At the end of a rocky red road

Little red cabin nestled in a hill

Where I dreamed and grew and still

Gray’s Lake, I long to be

In the grace of your red heart

I spent my year in Bali processing this separation, having left this beautiful land that I love so much. In the humid heat, riding my Yamaha scooter through winding jungle hills, I would find my mind flashing back to Gray’s Lake in the winter, bundled in snow gear riding my snowmobile through the mountains of Idaho.

Bali does that. She shows you exactly where your heart is.

I wasn’t ready to go though. I had so much to learn and experience. I had a voice to find and lose and now I’m loving. I had friends to make. I had visions to see. I had faith to cultivate. Faith in myself and the power within me.

And I still kicked and screamed like a small child that was afraid of the monsters in the closet. I did NOT want to go back home. It was too scary. I didn’t feel ready. I wanted to remain a child.

I’ve had conversations with people in Bali where the island is compared to Never Land or The Island of Misfit Toys, a place for those who cannot tolerate the real world or never want to grow up retreat to. This is true, and it’s not. There are plenty of people thriving in wisdom on this island in addition to the devoted and loving Balinese who teach us so much about being in a state of loving innocence, trusting and conscious. It’s something I’ve been seeking for years, as a devout fan of Mister Rogers and lover of the book “The Little Prince.” We can use more innocence and more childlike perspective.

And, it’s also important to grow up. Grow up in grace, like the ugly duckling who turns into a magnificent swan. Somehow I wanted to remain a duckling. I didn’t want to fly in grace. I didn’t want to acknowledge that I had run away from what I thought was the land of ugly ducks.

But what happens if I return a swan? What happens if I step back into my homeland in grace and gratitude and warmth. What happens if I kiss the grounds that grew me and sing praises to the land of my heart? What happens when I honor the souls that gave me life?

I’ve resisted this for so long. Thinking the worst. I’ve been running away from home since I was sixteen, when I joined Mormonism. I wanted to set myself apart and I’ve been not only setting myself apart but splintering myself into fractals, rejected shards left behind. I’ve forsaken my own heart.

My heart never left Idaho. My heart never left my family. So, I return to Idaho.

The call came to me so calmly. I had a dream and woke up completely transformed. No more fear, only calm maturity. I opened my laptop immediately and looked at flights. The most direct flight happened to be half price on January 23, 1/23, 1-2-3-4. This has been my sweet message from the universe for a year now that I’m on the right track. I’m completely confident and calm in this call. My inner knowing showed me that it’s time for me to honor my family as a daughter, to serve them, and to take my sweet inner child that played and came alive in Bali back to Idaho as a loving mother figure and show her that the monster in the closet is merely a mop and the booing poltergeist is actually a howling puppy. It’s not scary. It’s home. It always will be, nomatter where I go. And I will go many places. Me with my adult passport and my inner child with my new Mister Roger’s passport. We will go everywhere hand in hand after we go home.