You can never really go back home
Nostalgia is a mind's trick
“While you can never really go back home, you are looking for something that will help you feel close to some nice memories.”
This is a line from a Tarot reading I got in the last year. I had spoken with this woman for about 15 minutes and asked a specific question. The question was about finances and my goals to shift and expand towards more abundance for myself and my family but this line really has left me thinking.
“You can never really go back home.”
Are you a nostalgic person? Let me tell you what Nostalgia means.
a sentimental longing or wistful affection for the past, typically for a period or place with happy personal associations.
Nostalgia is a powerful emotion for me. I have always been drawn to quests and journey stories. I love to read a story where the protagonist is searching for something that will bring them more close to their truest Self and I feel this journey deeply in my own life. I am constantly seeking for new ways to learn about myself and others and why humans do the things they do and act the way that they act. I love learning about neuroscience and the brain and how our inner lives reflect our outer actions and emotions. I love humans. We are fascinating and surprising.
I always have felt like a seeker. In my younger years I tended to seek within the confines of the ideologies that I was raised in. My religious upbringing encouraged ‘seek ye learning even by study and also by faith.’ We were told to ‘seek ye out of the best books’ and highly pushed to study study study. The study just was in very specific places. Study the scriptures WE give you. Read the books by OUR leaders and not others. They don’t understand us and we must keep ourselves peculiar and separate from them.
As I have gotten older I have learned so much by seeking outside of the confines of my childhood origins. I did learn and grow a lot while seeking within the lines of religion and parental influences. I loved the journey and got a lot out of it.
My journey has expanded beyond those boundaries. I seek everywhere. My belief in things like tarot or astrology or energy work comes with a sense of wonder and awe and also skepticism. I do not believe that any one set of beliefs has all of the answers. I do, however, believe that we can find answers we are seeking no matter where we are looking if we are on the path to finding out what is best for us.
Seeking and nostalgia go hand in hand for me. I always have felt a bit outside of others. I feel a deep independent streak that manifests in my life in various ways. I live the farthest away from my family of origin than any of my siblings. Not having close access to them in proximity has come with a lot of grief and stress over the years. I have learned to live with it and manage it but it is a constant companion and contributes to why I am always seeking home a bit.
My childhood home is no longer accessible to me so I don’t have the physical manifestation of going to that place specifically. I do go back to my hometown every year. I get to stare up at the Flatirons in Boulder, CO at the view that I looked at every day of my 18 years of being a kid. It does bring me a sense of belonging that I don’t feel anywhere else.
Colorado is in my bones and blood. It is home in a way nothing else can ever be. And, I don’t want to live there right now. Except I wish my sister was down the street and not 1200 miles away. I do love sitting on her front porch every summer in my hometown and feeling the cool, dry morning air in my lungs. It feels like home at her house in Broomfield.
(The Flatirons in Boulder.)
This summer I started a list of things I love about Colorado:
Colorado things
Accents that sound like mine
The smell of a quick rainstorm
Cool mornings
Cool evenings
Mexican food
GREEN CHILI
Parks everywhere
The flatirons-the views of my childhood
Pearl Street
Local Diners-Great Scott’s Eatery
Chapstick
Lotion
Crickets
Aspen trees turning Gold in the Fall
Cattle guards
Mule deer
Gravel driveways
300 days of sunshine a year
I-25
I-70
Village Inn
Applebees
Good Times (burgers and frozen custard)
Chipotle
The Colorado National Monument
Main Street bagels
Farmers market every Thursday in summer
The Mesa
Powderhorn ski resort on Labor Day weekends
Cool grass you can walk barefoot through
Parks-everywhere
BHS
Tiny libraries with winding staircases to the basement
Glenwood Canyon
The Grand Valley
Wind chimes
Fires on the back porch
Walks through Sherwood Park
Dos Hombres
Key Lime Pie
City Market
Grandma and grandpa’s house
Croquet
Shooting a bow in the front yard at a target
I don’t ever really notice my Colorado accent but when we crossed over the border into CO from Kansas and stopped in Limon at a gas station with a CO gift shop and the guy smiled at me and said, “Hey, how are you doing today?” I realized it sounded sooooooo much like me and it made me tear up. And then a rainstorm blew through, welcoming me home with the smell of rain that only really is that strong in the desert plains of the west and I knew I was home in a way I am not in my daily life.
At the same time, everything is different. My parents don’t live there anymore and haven’t for decades. My life exists in the South now with visits to the West where I used to be an exclusively Western girl. I am still seeking for personal growth and learning but in every different way imaginable.
My family has always been and will always be very important to me. Relationships with my DNA relatives are special and I cherish them.
AND
I am different. I think differently and do things that I never used to do or even have a desire to do. I am changed and changing.
Thank goodness.
(This is a screen shot of a poem I saved to my camera roll. Feels appropriate)
This idea of never being able to return home makes me feel grief. I want to go “where everybody knows your name, and they’re always glad you came.” The ‘Cheers’ theme song runs through my head often actually. I love being in familiar spaces.
But in my life lately, I have had an inexorable pull toward the future. I have been seeking to find the home within myself as I walk completely new paths. I have been challenged and pushed to brinks I didn’t know existed within myself and I have blown through barriers that I didn’t know were there or that I could surpass.
I am new constantly. New and the same. I am still a seeker. I am curious and hopeful and I am grieving and melancholy. I am inimitable, I am an original. ;)
The pull to return is a strong one. But the return now in my nostalgic mind seems to be a return to a Self that I haven’t met yet. The one I can potentially become if I allow myself to full expand. I seek for this in all things.
How are you expanding in your life right now? Tell me, I would love to know.
Sending love to you out there in the ether,
Stef
Sharing this song that has spoken to my heart this year and I grow and expand.