Coming home

I love traveling and this spring I did a lot of it. I love soaking up new experiences and images. But, at one point, I returned home, looked around me, and thought: how wonderful to be home. I want to stay here now.

This is also true for my inner journey. I remain hungry for new insights, new wisdom, and new possibilities to live life fully. And this is a good thing. It’s a natural process, to want to grow and not stagnate. But the paradox is that the real destination of all our travels is to come home. Come home to whom we truly are. Coming home means laying aside the masks we wear and letting go all the stories we tell ourselves about who we should be.

This brings us to an even bigger paradox: We already are home. Who we are now, is exactly who we should be. This has also been the message of the great spiritual leaders through the centuries. Eckhart Tolle voices it clearly in his book The Power of Now. The secret is: we already are home, we never left.

Is this a difficult concept? Do you have trouble accepting it? This is a truth you can only know with your heart, it doesn’t work to try and reason it out. Take a look at yourself in the mirror and say to yourself, “I love you just the way you are. You are perfectly good.” Watch your own eyes as you say this, they will immediately reflect your reaction. Can you feel the truth of your words? Remind yourself, as often as you can, that life is here to be lived, one moment at a time. Just by sitting out in the garden, feeling the sun’s warmth on your face, and listening to the birdsong.

To me, the following excerpt from the poem Santiago by my favorite poet, David Whyte, says it so eloquently:

…so that one day you realized that what you wanted
had already happened long ago and in the dwelling place
in which you had lived before you began,
and that every step along the way, you had carried
the heart and the mind and the promise,
that first set you off and then drew you on, and that you were more marvelous in your simple wish to find a way
than the gilded roofs of any destination you could reach




Let yourself be inspired by the images in my Pinterest album and please share your experiences with us!