intentions for home time
before I began this nomadic journey, I asked for advice from a friend who, a year earlier, was on his own world travels. he said to me:
“there is no such thing as being in the wrong place. know that you are always in the right place, at the right time.”
so, this is my life right now: after fleeing the lockdown in Europe, I’m staying at a friend’s house on the outskirts of a small city in Japan. my day to day life revolves mostly around domestic household activities. we clean, cook, eat together, and grocery shop. I barely leave the house.
it feels like the polar opposite of the life I led the past two months — when I lived in four European cities, and filled my days absorbing and seeing; my nights full of activities, friends, and dancing tango.
my homebody Japanese life feels like the yin to all of that. the shadow moon side. the perfect opposition to daylight. it is full of emptiness, spaciousness, and aloneness. in a good way.
though I’ve always thought of myself as extremely restless, now, this home life is exactly what I need. it feels like exactly where I’m meant to be.
so, the question I’m asking myself this:
now that I find myself here…
what treasures am I meant to discover from this period of home time? … from being “here?”
I believe that each place and time carries its own treasures, waiting for us to discover them. each place has a “here-ness,” and carries a different flavor. together, all the places reveal different dimensions of ourselves, and make up the changing complexity of our beings.
what if, rather than seeing this time as a disruption to “normal” life, what if this self-isolation is exactly what we need right now?
as individuals, and as a society?
how often are we distracted and diluted from facing the fullness of ourselves? how much energy do we expend on making the commute to work, dealing with office culture, and busying ourselves with the external logistics of day to day life?
what rises to the surface when all of that stops? how do we face ourselves, when forced to sit alone in a room?
what version of myself will I meet, in these next coming weeks?
what if we saw this time as a much needed “retreat?”
I will share some very loose intentions for my own period of self-isolation.
I allow myself to let go of fixed notions of time. I allow myself to reconnect with my body’s natural rhythms — of rest, work, eating, connection and disconnection. rather than fitting myself into any socially prescribed (or self-prescribed structures) I allow the organic fluidity of my organism to just be. I will let go of all expectations of what I “should” be doing at any given “clocktime,” and to do what I feel like doing. I’ll use daylight and my body rhythms as my compass to time.
I intend to choose silence and emptiness over shallow, gratuitous information intake. like social media, which I for the most part loathe, or like the news — which, apart from the minimal I need to stay informed and aware, doesn’t add any extra value in my life, or richness to my interior world. if anything, it dilutes and takes away.
I intend to lean into the poetry and sweetness of daily home life. I wish to settle nourish a pure and simple relationship with “home,” as a place within myself and a place I create. I wish to savor and find pleasure in the small things — a salty hot bowl of ramen, the overwhelming taste of plum liqueur, the joy of watching rain fall outside… and find it as soul shaking exciting as seeing the Acropolis in full sun.
I intend to fill time by pouring myself more deeply and completely into my soul work: in nurturing the creative spirit, practicing deep feeling sensitivity to the world, nourishing a radical way of self-care and personal creative expression. when much of the world is feeling powerless to stop suffering and pain, I see, now more than ever, my role as an artist and creator in the world — to serve in whatever small ways, as best as I can, to give life greater meaning and depth.
this is what I see in this time. I don’t know how long it will last, but I know that I wish to live well in it. live as fully as I would if I were traveling across four cities, seeing the world. this is a time for me to see myself, and my deepest work.
and you? what are your intentions for this period of time? our collective self-isolation? I’d love to hear about it.