“Last night I dreamt I was returning, / and my heart called out to you. / But I fear you won't be like I left you. / Me kealoha kuʻu home ʻo Kahaluʻu.” - Olomana
I’m continuing my musings today reflecting on the intention I set during the New Moon (To Love The Person I Have Always Been). The First Quarter Moon passed on Sunday, so it’s time to start making something out of my reflections and adjust the route, if necessary.
I have been pondering over a question about “home” in my last Accountabilla Blog.
Sometimes it feels like “home” is the place I come from. I’m so lucky to have been born on Guahan, and to have spent my first years drinking the smell of plumerias carried by honey humid breezes. I’m so lucky to have been raised in Hawaiʻi, to have learned how to fish with a bamboo fishing pole, how to haku leipoʻo, how to make onigiri, how to play ukulele, and how to surf.
I haven’t been able to explain why calling these places home never felt quite right. When I introduce myself to new friends, and they ask me about my story, where do I call home, there is a sensation in my heart of a seatbelt buckle unable to latch. A misfired high five. Seeing someone who might have called my name, but they were talking to the person behind me. It’s also a sense of longing for Coldplay to write a song for me and it was called yellow.
I live in Los Angeles now. I look around at this city famous for hair metal bands, socialites, shopping bags, and vast stretches of freeway tangled with so many cars during rush hour. I feel the ever escalating heat waves driven by climate change under a densely smoggy sky.
In the subtlest of ways, I might feel at home here.
Here I get to express my full, authentic self, which is essentially a silly goose. The silliest of geese. Here, I can pretend to be a blue heron at the LA River, or a squirrel chasing after acorns, hiding them underneath my favorite tree in Los Feliz. I can gaze up at skyscrapers, power lines and palm trees and wonder at the Red-Tailed Hawks, crows, ravens, mockingbirds and hummingbirds, as well as shady magnolias and the irritating but beautiful jacarandas that dust the city in an invasive, purple mess.
And still… The buckle doesn’t quite latch.
The other day, a thought seemed to crack my heart open. I can name what I’m feeling. There is a mix of sorrow and loss, loneliness, a deep, aching desire to be seen and welcomed, to feel safe from the dangers of the world, and safe from my own imploding thoughts. There is also a sinking suspicion that I’ll never know the remedy.
The more I examined the shape of this feeling of missing-ness, the sharper the clenching in my chest. In the spirit of the idea that to name it is to tame it, I kept staring into that crack, and the abyss beyond, waiting for the words to come to me.
I feel like…
Home is the collection of ingredients and relationships cultivated in collaboration and with intention.
Home is the harvest of those ingredients mixed with generations of knowledge beckoning these plants and minerals to come together to heal.
Home is that sensation of ointment being applied by a gentle hand. Home is a soft scolding about lessons learned and a grateful agreement.
Home is the time given to rest and recover. It’s the large pot of hearty stew and rice. It’s the bed that lets me sink into it when my spirit is tired. It’s the stuffed animals that I will never stop loving, right there next to my head.
Home is in the knowing.
A place on a map could never provide these qualities to me, at least not without my effort and curiosity, and certainly not without the attention and care of my neighbors.
Maybe that’s why, in a moment of my life that was heavy with grief and loss, I looked out my window to find one of my favorite neighbors peeking between palm leaves, checking in on me: a female Anna’s Hummingbird hovering and glittering green in the evening light. I find myself doodling her fairly often (one of my doodles I’ve shared to the right).
Beyond that crack in my chest, there might be any number of experiences that wired my brain the way it is. I also accept that I simply live in a body, and bodies are impermanent and fragile and react to their environment in a variety of ways. Mine seems to react to everything and turns up the hyper vigilance dial up to 11. What becomes increasingly important to me is the practice of enjoying all that this world has to offer in spite of my melancholy, no matter why it happens.
The experience of living in this body is kind of intense sometimes. I accept the intensity. I relish the intensity of me, and I think there are those who enjoy doing the same. I carry home with me when I give myself nurturing and care. I carry home with me when I step into the hard things and give myself time and medicine to recover from the challenges. I remember to pay attention so that fleeting experiences of joy and wonder don’t pass me by. I invite loved ones to join me in this practice of loving the gifts I’ve been given simply because I’m alive. Every day presents an opportunity to learn to do this practice better.
That’s one way I can love the person I’ve always been. To practice the creation and cultivation of home. To carry the practice with me. And to share this practice with my world.
Reciprocity
How can an imperfect person with a fragile body and an overstimulated nervous system reciprocate the loving gesture of a hummingbird neighbor? How can we protect our neighbors, human and non-human, in the face of terrifying circumstances? From the ever worsening phenomenon of human-driven climate change to the rising acceptance of xenophobia and fascism in this big year of 2025, how can we work together to create safe havens when the challenges are being doled out with an intentional effort to break our spirits? How can we keep giving each other home?
That’s what I’ll be pondering until the next time.
Wish me luck!