HOME. Is it a place, a person, or a feeling? If we’ve never experienced true belonging, can we recognize it when we do find it? I have been in Sri Lanka, my home country, for about two and half weeks. The days have been filled with milestone celebrations (25 years of marriage!), seeing friends and family and lots of time by the ocean in both Sri Lanka and the Maldives. At the halfway mark of my trip, with my immediate family on their way back to their lives across the world, I have been thinking about what home truly means.
Deeply connected to my island and utterly displaced in Wisconsin, I was completely thrown off when I met my husband, during senior year in college. In just a few encounters I felt my soul lock in with something of his. It wasn’t “love” in the bubbly and heady teenage way I had been used to. Rather, it was quiet, calm - almost an ancient knowing that this human, in this cold foreign place, was known to me from lifetimes past. We both trusted this in a way our young minds couldn’t articulate, and while it was tested in ways we could never have imagined as wide eyed 20 something’s, we worked through the awful and the beautiful and have built a life I am so grateful for!
True belonging for me is a soul-level connection. It’s a recognition of the familiar; a place that I am so comfortable that I let go of any inner brace. It’s a moment when my breath slows, my exhales lengthen, and my shoulders drop down to release into my full heart. I have been blessed to have been born in Sri Lanka which will always be my home. I have also been gifted the opportunity to test what home means and find belonging in a different way in America. In 30 years of living between two worlds I keep learning that “home” can be many places at once. It can live in the way you feel when you are with family and friends who really know you. It is fluid and flowing, rather than rigid and fixed.
What does home mean for you? Has it shifted or changed from what it used to be? If you are still seeking your true home, how is it manifested in your visioning? And will you know when you finally find it?
Warmly,
Nilmini
