Hello dear reader,

How are you this week? Where do your feet stand?

„There is no place that isn’t a home” has become my mantra these days. I repeat it to myself when the fierce “I am—still here” burns through my heart.

As in the poem, we are so often plucked out of the spaces we love. These spaces can be many: it can be a physical space which we have to leave despite our longing to remain, it can be a place of another’s loving arms, it can be a place of stable health—physical or mental—which can at first, in itself, feel like an impossible kind of betrayal. It can be a community, a friend group, a job we felt deeply at home in—or, oftentimes, it can also be a sense of identity, a self-image we held onto like a lifeline. Or it call be all at once.

All these departures can make us feel as if we are being exiled from the lands of safety. Like the ground is collapsing beneath our feet. And nobody teaches us how to make that next, frightening, weary step into thin air. It is an art as elusive as it is salvific—especially when it’s been long since we felt some solid ground under our wounded feet.

With enough life-quakes, we come to a point when we realise that ground was never there in the first place. When we are denied belonging, over and over, we realise the only place we can truly be at home is within ourselves.

I know—we’ve all heard that. I had too. But holding it as a beautiful idea is very different from being forged and ripped apart into a shape capable of landing in that truth. It’s a kind of pain I could never have imagined. And if you relate to these words, I suppose you couldn’t have either—until you did.

Slowly, I am learning to belong in myself. Not as an expression of self-love, or self-empowerment, or self-reclamation. This kind of belonging is not something one chooses out of self-care. It is what slowly, almost invisibly, falls into one’s hands when they’re emptied out of the very last thing they desperately held onto—the illusion of a fixed self. When they wiped a thousand tears off the tender cheeks, and at last, it is understood: there is no freedom from suffering, but there can be freedom in it.

And through it, an inhabiting of a kind of love which cannot be described takes place. Which—just like suffering—is impersonal.

Home is not a place, but presence—a witness to every form and every moment— regardless of how painful they can be. In each moment, it is an arrival. A return to remembering we have never left.

there is no place that isn’t a home

We are being plucked out 
of the spaces we love. They say 
we don't belong
I say — there is no place 
that isn't a home. 

Please don't tell me 
I should not dream
beyond where my feet stand, 
for I know that from the place 
of my love, I can go as far 
as I please, and I won't leap
beyond it.

The time blooms at my feet
and the possibilities yawn, awaiting
my daring hand 
to reach for them.

Patience? Yes, plenty!
Not for what is yet to be, however,
and the distances in between here and there
— but for loving ... 

so it grows deep and vast enough
I can be where and who I want to be
— and never be told otherwise
by my very little self.

P.S. The subtitle comes from a song by Florence + The Machine titled “Cosmic Love.” Some of you know I don’t really listen to music—almost at all—but this song found me this week. I only listened to it once, and yet it stayed with me. While writing today, I found myself weaving it into this post. It felt fitting. To me, it invokes the inner fire.

Dissolution—and the death of the self we once knew—can feel like darkness swallowing us. But in that darkness, there is a fire. And it begins to make itself known only after we’ve stopped resisting the dark.

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Before you go:

A gentle prompt to aid you in this week’s reflection:

What can’t you hold anymore?

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