Sometimes, after some inner growth, I feel as if I’ve found my way back.  I’m struck by the sense that I was lost, and I’m only realizing it now that I’ve returned. 

I suppose it feels as if I was lost because each new level feels so familiar.  And by contrast, the places I started feel so distant from it. 

I couldn’t possibly have been lost, though, because that would mean that I knew where I was supposed to be. 

And yet…

So much of this journey feels like a return to a home that I knew once and yet also have never been.  Somewhere that I knew so well, before this life, before this story, before this time – but also that I have never seen or touched in this one. 

And each new lesson, new awareness, new understanding – each shift is just bringing me closer to that place where I once lived.  That place where I long to be again.

There’s a word for that pull towards a home that you know and yet also doesn’t exist.  Hiraeth.  Such a lovely word that means a nostalgic longing for home, even if you’ve never been there. 

But even this beautiful word doesn’t quite capture it.  Because this is less like longing, with its implied loss or distance, and more like welcoming or calling.  A subtle memory of a home that can be again.  It’s a comfort, a safety, a sense of knowing that home is still here.  All the time. 

And all I’m doing now is uncovering it, lesson by lesson and layer by layer. 

It’s like I’ve never been there but also never left.  And if that’s what it means to be lost, then I’ll never want for a map again. 

What’s even crazier is the feeling that it’s not just home that I’m returning to, if you could call it that.  It’s also family.  Family who are also traveling without a map, following a memory, brushing off the layers, and shifting with each new discovery. 

We call one another sometimes.  Seeking each other out like rare flowers planted in all the corners of the earth.  Rejoicing in each others’ blooms, sometimes offering one another a bit of sun or sending blessings of rain. 

And so I sit here and smile, just a crazy lady with no map, as I think “wow, I got lost there for a minute”. 

Because I know deep inside that none of us are lost.  We’re all just re-discovering home, and remembering each other sometimes along the way. 

©️ Cristen Writes

Special love and gratitude to PJR and MAP