At the end of The Wizard of Oz Dorothy wants nothing more than to go home. Glenda, the Good Witch, tells Dorothy that she just has to click her heels three times to find herself right back where she started, in her own backyard. I love this idea that we already have everything we need, and that when we go searching, usually we end up right back where we started, too. This resonates pretty fiercely for someone who has moved every two years in the past 20. It used to be that I had start-over-itis, and looked forward to exploring the next place we lived. After about two years, I'd start to get restless. I took great pride that in my last teaching position, I stayed for three years. It seemed like an enormous accomplishment for me.
This wanderlust has served me well. I've met wonderful people, stepped in plenty of different oceans, climbed some mountains, lived in a country that spoke languages different than mine, learned some cultural sensitivity, and mostly, learned how fantastic it feels to go home. Home has always symbolized where my mom is, and if you met her, you'd understand why. In a life of constant motion and travel, she has always been the anchor for me. I could always just go home, settle in, and get back my bearings.
While we were living overseas, my mom got breast cancer and it was perhaps the biggest wake up call of my life to date. She is healthy and fine now, but it slowly dawned on me that if you don't create in yourself your own anchor, you might someday become unmoored. This is hard to do, for me at least, in a life of constant motion. For myself and the family I'm raising, I realized that I needed to do a better job of creating that sense of home for ourselves, regardless of where we lived. This is what I'm up to right now. I'm digging in, despite hitting the two year mark, when typically the brown cardboard moving boxes magically appear. I'm so grateful for the reprieve, and look forward to at least one more year here in this home we love.
When I was in high school, I took a French class and was the only student in it. My teacher was sort of lazy, but she was more creative than I gave her credit for at the time. During that year, she assigned Candide for me to read, an endlessly long (for me) and meandering story that tested my limited knowledge of French and caused me some anguish. Back then, I sort of nodded a lot when she explained the nuances of Voltaire's philosophical musings, the basic jist of which was, "Il faut cultiver notre jardin" which loosely translated means, "One must cultivate our garden." At the time, I thought it was a sort of lame ending for a book, but when I lived in North Africa, worrying about my mother during her sickness, and craving being closer to home, Candide's revelation kept circling through my brain.
And I got it, really, that all he's saying is that we need to cultivate our own garden, tend to our own business and needs, and instead of traveling all over the globe, we can just look, ahem, in our own backyard. Wiser, more grounded folk might not need to travel to another continent to figure this out. What can you do? This is apparently my process.
On a literal level, there's something to be said for being in one spot long enough to plant roots--both in the everyday details of life, and in the flower beds out back. Growing something takes a long time: friendships, routines, a sense of home. And if you sit still long enough, you can let things compost a bit. I've been doing a lot of this lately, and it's sort of wonderful. When you aren't up and moving, you can focus on big picture things in a different way.
All this is to say that I am planting something pretty exciting in this garden of mine. Today I wrote the rough draft of an essay I'm preparing for an application to graduate school. I want to get a degree in counseling, so today I started. Of course, it's an online degree program that I can pack up and move to the next place. What's most exciting to me is that this degree is just training me to do what I already feel I do. I already am who I need to be to chase after this dream--it just fits me. So today after I finished my first draft, I smiled and thought of those ruby slippers, not because I was feeling nostalgic, but because it's refreshing to feel like I'm traveling a path that's of my own making, and that is my life's purpose. I mean that's not something that happens to me every day. It's worth some red glitter.
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