A quiet word about moving on..

I’m in Ghana just now (reflections to come shortly) but as I am nearing the end of my stay here, I have found myself thinking about heading ‘home’.

“Home” – being a troublesome term when I currently, literally, do not have an address, nor truly know when I will acquire one. Obligations and meetings have me in London, Cambridge, Dorset and Glasgow in the days following my return from Accra, and so i feel somewhat sooner inclined to the notion of ‘heading onward’ than ‘heading home’. It certainly makes for less dissonance whilst my mind is assimilating the concepts surrounding my various decisions to, also, mentally ‘move on’.

I can’t help but imagine that if I deftly clicked the heels of these red-glitter pumps and chanted the infamous;
“There’s no place like home, there’s no place like home…”
Kismet would just shrug her many shoulders and look at me as if to say;
“Well…You’re on your own here Luv.”

…and i think i’m cool with that.

Flotsam & Jetsam

“There is a magic in that little world, home; it is a mystic circle that surrounds comforts and virtues never known beyond its hallowed limits” – Robert Southey

I spent last week, *all* of last week, moving out of my apartment of ~3 years to became temporarily homeless pending permanent digs 350 miles away, in London.

Let it be said from the outset, I despise moving house; having done it with enough frequency to be permitted to comment.

As if it wasn’t enough to contend with the logistical and practical pain-in-the-arsery of collecting boxes, cleaning and wrapping everything you own, not having access to half the things you love because you packed them already or worrying they’ll get damaged, or even the damnable “who owns what” of it all..

As if that wasn’t enough, there’s then the emotional wrench of tearing up carefully laid roots. Deceptive, like re-potting an established flower, it is not so much the roots you can see being torn from the earth that you need worry about, gory although it is. It is the tiny, fragile hairs that you don’t see being damaged, about which you should be concerned.

Yes, yes, protestations aside, it isn’t the obvious physical trauma of moving that I hate insofar as it is the quiet discomfort of having nowhere to belong. The screaming dissonance of having de-coupled oneself from a deep, ineradicable sense of “home”.

The place where my things are, the place I feel safe, I feel comforted and where there are no expectations or requirements upon me, is no more.

For me, knowing I have a secure base is the thing that allows me to go headfirst into situations which inspire insecurity. I absolutely require a physical space where I can lock out the rest of the world. Somewhere peaceful, safe, and mine. Long term, of course, I would rather these things divorced from the physical and I have spoken at length regarding my efforts towards cultivating a sanctuary of inner space to depend upon. But until this time, I’m something of a girl adrift.

So what of “now” ? Well, I seem to be finding my sanctuary by associating only with other lost souls. The flotsam and jetsam of this world. For those who were cast out, and those who cast themselves out, have a way of finding one another.

But it is an interesting predicament, something of a territorial instinct, that without a few square metres of this strange planet to defend and call our own we cannot, really, venture forth.

“Don’t you realize that the sea is the home of water? All water is off on a journey unless it’s in the sea, and it’s homesick, and bound to make its way home someday”
– Zora Neale Hurston