Ready for Retreat

I have been moved a couple times in the last week toward retreat. This happens often when I have been spending far too much time socializing on the Internet (I feel the need to draw back in, process it all, and then grow it outward). No surprise that my feeling drawn toward transformation comes in the midst of this new life I am setting out to live. I have big plans for this transformation, and I need to do some retreating to figure out the details of my innards ♥

In case anyone was interested, this blog post first got me to thinking (thank you, MB, for sharing), and this gathering has moved me beyond words. I feel like that last one is what my soul has been searching for my whole life. Anyone who has visited the spaces I create will know how perfectly aligned this is for me. And I want to healing-sob from the deep depths of me over the perfectness of timing and location...

My current life feels so out of line. I need to get aligned. I don't know how long my retreat will be, but I look forward to me re-emergence ♥

Home is Where the Heart Is

I have been reading a lot of stuff recently on "home". Maybe it is the nomad blogs I follow, maybe it is the Law of Attraction... But it has been a delicious guide to helping me define home for myself, and I wanted to share it with you.

For me, home is literally where my heart is, so wherever my children are together, I am home.

Once that is established, home is inside me.

It is being content with who I am and where I am and what I am and why I am. When I am content, I can be "at home" anywhere.

Home is an opportunity to connect with nature in a "we are one" way, and so I am home at the beach just watching the waves. I am at home sitting in some grass staring at flowers, or up late at night looking up into a blanket of sparkling stars. When I am in nature, I always have the opportunity to be home.

Home, for me, usually revolves around a familiar experience or the memory of a wonderful experience. It might be recognizing a state license plate or stepping into my personalized RV or my child doing his or her usual funny thing in a situation. It's inside jokes and the familiarity of easing into meeting a new interesting person. It's the smell of our clothes in our closet. It's the songs I listen to for different occasions. It's driving into a new city and seeing the sunrise through new building tops. It's catching a glimpse of someone you have met in someone new :))

The logistics of home for me usually require inside comfort, Like feeling secure about the place we are living, like our own family bed, some privacy to hibernate undisturbed when retreat is necessary or to nurse without discretion while we sleep, the freedom to live by our rules and decorate our way, an ease about our daily schedule. These are the things that make places feel like home to me.

Maybe it is because I moved so much growing up, or because I travelled with my mom for those years, but home for me, really can be created almost anywhere I set up camp.

The funny thing about our anticipated adventures is that I am very much a homebody. Living in an RV may be the only way I will get out and see anything! As usual, I am an odd combination of 2 extremes: homebody and nomad, so I am combining the 2 :))

A house is not right for me right now, and an RV feels uch ore inviting and home-like right now.

Living in an RV will suit a part of me that refuses to identify as lazy. Lazy implies a certain "wrongness" or bad choice, doesn't it? I am still searching for a word that adequately aligns with the feeling inside me of having very little demands upon me. I want everything to be within about an arm's reach from me. I want to not have to lose sight of the project that is close to my heart and feels the need to be close in proximity, as I lovingly assist my baby in the bathroom. I want my kids right up on me while they are playing. I love the proximity, the closeness, the comfort of each of us having our own tiny bubble cuddled up with someone else's. I don't have the draw toward seperation that some have -- I am the opposite. I have a draw toward closeness. BUT the best part, and the balance, is that we will have more space outside our bedroom door than most. We will have vast space to breathe in and exhale out, vast space to see and run and explore. I hope to spend lots of time outside when I need it and plenty of time indoors when I need it. And we can each self-regulate this for ourselves.

I think we have a different relationship with space than many cultures do around the world. People ask me how me and my kids and pets are going to live comfortably in such a teeny space, when bigger families than mine live in smaller spaces very happily elsewhere. It isn't really about the actual size of the space -- ask someone from New York, as opposed to someone from the midwest. Ask someone in Hong Kong as opposed to someone in a tribal village in Africa. Space is cultural, and space is relative, and space is more complicated than just physical proximity, and space is something we all get to define for ourselves.

The funny part is that now that I have begun to define where I want to go and explore what it will feel like, so we can plan what would be best for us, now this house feels like a mansion. It feels like big empty hallways and too many rooms full of too much stuff. I am a radical minimalist. I could easily do one of those "own 100 things" challenges, and when we have the world to explore (rather than stuff to explore), it will be easy and healing to shed all that weight and remain as light and fluid as we need to be, to do what we are going to do.

Having space and lots of stuff does not make somewhere home for us. Living on the road will be just as much opportunity for that home feeling, and maybe even more, since we have always rented and had the details of the space we were living in dictated by a landlord. This RV will be our's! I will own it. I will own our home. There is something special about that feeling :)))

I am not expecting this new home to be the final answer for our lives, but it is the next answer for our lives, and someday we will find this RV living to be out of alignment, and we will adjust life as needed. Home is living life in the now and for the now. Home is not being afraid to make changes as we need to make them :))

Home is coming back for holidays whenever possible and LOVING the familiarity :))
 
Wherever our heart is, we are home ♥
 

The Disease

I have mentioned a few times the "healing" and the "dis-ease" that I am hoping a road-life will remedy. So, I thought I would come share a bit about all of that.

My dis-ease is commonly referred to as depression. I don't suffer from depression. Firstly, I don't suffer (unless I have the nagging feeling that someone feels I should be doing something other than hybernating, in which case the guilt inside me sometimes feels like suffering). And secondly, what I am experiencing is not something to clinicize and medicate or whatnot. Yes, there is a remedy for it, and that has always been to follow what my insides are calling for, be that deep dark quiet inner work, or climbing under the blankets and not coming out for a week, or searching for joy through connections with fellow soulful kindreds. I have found more relief from following where my "depression" is taking me than from resisting it. And I have learned more about myself from those times than from any other in my life. Usually it stems from a kind of learned helplessness in my life. Often creative movement (inside or outside) of some sort remedies that hopelessness when I am ready for the shift. Like most things in my life, I have not sought "expert" help in my journey -- I had no interest in a label that would be my crutch when I was younger, and by the time I realized I was strong enough to handle this, I also realized what blessing this time spent was.

I think we live in a society that values extroversion over introversion, so we aren't socialized to value people drawing into holes and finding healing and growth. And I think that this society is often the reason we need healing in the first place -- be it how we teach the parents to treat their children, or disconnect completely from what is earthy and feminine, or impose "bigger" and "better" and "more" upon the embodiment of all that is reverent in our hearts ♥ This has been my experience anyway, and I know that what makes each of us feel helpless is different. SO...

Having said all of that, taking my life on the road will provide remedy to a few things. I crave movement. I used to think it was that I was runniing from something, and I tried to dig up what it was that I was running from. Now, I feel I have laid the details of my past to rest -- I am at peace with it, and I just need to flow like the water I am. A nomadic lifestyle will provide this to perfection very adequately with room for discontent.

The other part of my life that will find healing is the close proximity. The funny part is that people's first question is usually something to the effect of "Won't that be uncomfortable to have so many people in such a small space?" They must not know me :)) But I can't be mad -- it took me some reflection to realize this about myself, too, and in this "bigger = better" society, of course that would be the first question! :))

I love small intimate spaces. I am SUCH a radical minimalist, you can only begin to imagine. In fact, I am specifically chosing a smaller RV than some bigger spaces. I am looking forward to cleaning the entire place in the time it currently takes me to sweep and mop the floor. I am looking forward to my "dirtiness limit" getting hit (because we are in such a small space) before I have a 2-day project ahead of me. I am looking forward to having so little stuff to clean and organize, looking forward to the bulk of our "mess-desiring" to happen outside in nature. It will feel so healing to me to have such a small space to be responsible for. Having said that, most of the space in the RV will be for the kids, because I want them to be able to keep the things they are not ready to get rid of right now.

I am excited about living aligned with my super simple self :))
So, I guess to put it simply: I feel like the weight of this stagnant unauthentic life is what is ailing me, and the remedy will be to follow my minimalist gypsy heart.