Monthly Archives: April 2023

Home Turf

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A wise friend has suggested that I can’t locate home turf outside of myself because home is a place that is connected to the inside of me, and there I am belonging, and there are my roots. The whole journey of coming home to self in a way that is satisfying and fulfilling.

In my last post, I wrote about the lost connection with Corfe and the expected but missing connections with Australia. I feel I must mourn these losses. This is the grief of dashed expectations, and a peculiar loneliness at being left by places: a site of another abandonment, another miserable and mixed-up feeling.

I have had the sensation of home and felt sense of belonging on the turf of my childhood, but I am not sure if it is just a romantic and dreamlike fantasy, which doesn’t make sense in the reality of my life now. I am uncertain if I trust my judgment, it is proving fallible and contrary. I am driven by many different views from many different parts of my self. Can I ever achieve unity of purpose and direction?

I have a sense of wishing to escape. I have a life where I feel imprisoned by my own scaffold, the things I have manifested and let in, kept on. There are too many books, ornaments and other bric-a-brac – assortments of old and new life. Not carefully curated; I have not had the energy to sort and make decisions about them – I have an eternal and consistently brooding to-do list! 

Yesterday I walked a favourite walk here, a path that has sparked joy and contentment previously. Yesterday it seemed less warm and inviting. I am detached from these surroundings. Another friend, who is a Londoner by birth, has adopted the Shropshire hills as her home, she wants to be here and look at them for the rest of her life. I envy her the certainty she feels as she walks, and her feet touch the ground upon which they feel they belong.

Am I destined to search forever? And what is it that I am looking for?

Maybe my wise friend is going to be right, and it will be something I feel arising out of my own self. 

This is a journey of many years and many twists and loops. There have been some false dawns already, I am watching to see if the sun will rise for real…

Out of Place

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Unexpectedly, I wept this morning as I read a blog of a friend who has returned to her motherland, a return to her childhood homeland. This caught me off guard, unawares. The grief of longing and envy hit me. Deeply, I wished to be in that place of having settled and feeling like I was at home, in my own place, or feeling the sense of breathing out somewhere.

I have no throughline. No sense of unbroken connection from my history, my ancestry, my life: to place or people or family.

The wish of belonging to a sense of place is such that I find I want to put roots down anywhere I live and find that I can’t. The unbelonging in sense of place has a corollary in that I feel more unfixed and randomness in where I end up, which fuels disappointment and restlessness in me. 

There is an untetheredness that permeates my life as I move around from place to place with partners or work. Always searching for that elusive space to feel grounded. 

Looking for this connection in parts of the world, I have had romantic links to a few. At first, my imaginings of visiting Australia were all about finding a place to belong. I wanted to be an Aussie. When I eventually arrived there to spend time with my birth mother and family, I discovered that I was, by accident of birthplace, entirely British. The Australian culture is not mine. There is no sense of coming home to be found there.

In my adoptive family, we had links through my father to Dorset, particularly to Corfe Castle. I have spent 56 years feeling like that was some sort of home and had seemingly a therapeutic throughline that I clung to. I visited often, every important person in my life has been there, I got remarried there – a dream come true. 

And then, this week, I find myself saying I won’t go there again. Not out of any petulance or angry feeling, just some deep knowing. I was shocked and so is J. How is it that a place which held such memories and gathered me in such a way that I longed to return can suddenly be seen so differently?

I felt it shift the last time we visited in 2021, with the sense that I didn’t need it so much. It has been a safe space, a place I held in my heart as a  certainty. This was not my last experience. Still lovely but the magical feeling of it had gone. I don’t have a full understanding of this even now.

As I came to this morning after my surprising reaction to my friend’s news, I began to wonder if I need to be moving on. Where can I lay some roots down? Do I need to move to my childhood home- Yorkshire does have a certain pull to it, it feels familiar and I have a sense of being in a place I understand when I am there. Never mind that my childhood there was not happy, that isn’t the issue, somehow I fit better there…

It is a conundrum. J and I decided to be where we are because it is new for us both. After nearly nine years here do we need to change it? He has a pull to his hometown, where he does have through line and belonging. I have a different pull; to search for my tethering and see where that takes me. 

The page turns and I am faced with a blank sheet …