You know those quotes that stick with you? The ones that, even years later, rebound and reverberate through you again and again.  The ones that live rent free in the home that is your mind.  This is one for me:

“For a seed to achieve it’s greatest expression, it must come completely undone. The shell cracks, its insides come out and everything changes. To someone who doesn’t understand growth, it would look like complete destruction.” – Cynthia Ocelli

When starting this space, I was in the midst of a major home renovation.  My partner and I bought my childhood home a few years prior.  And slowly but surely, with no uncertain amount of intentionality, began our renovation journey. This was my first real home in the U.S. when I moved here from Hong Kong as a toddler. I grew up, as many kids of my background did, not necessarily feeling a sense of home and belonging.  As an adult, we bought it for a variety of reasons I suppose, but none that seemed to outweigh another.  However, what began with that purchase was both a literal and figurative excavation into who I was, who I am, and who I am becoming.  

For the majority of my career, I was privileged to work with people from around the world. People who had experienced trauma as a result of war, forced displacement, trafficking in persons, and other disasters, both natural and manmade.  Folks who had experienced childhood sexual abuse, domestic and intimate partner violence, political and gender based violence.  Humans who continued to experience crisis and trauma, even after coming to a place meant to inspire hope, safety, and opportunity.  I saw the dark—and a lot of it.  I also saw so much light it was at times blinding. 

I worked alongside a team of social service providers, those who came and went, sometimes because the work, understandably, was so hard.  I worked with some who stayed, perhaps too long.  For some because they couldn’t envision a life doing anything else.  Some who had lived through unspeakable atrocity themselves; who relived those experiences through the stories of those they now sought to help.  Some whose families were still stuck; escape an impossibility. 

Home, it seems, has always been on my mind. 

Home is a privilege.  A safe home, a slow home, is at least.  Its not something to ever be taken for granted.  Home is sacred.  And it means so many different things. Different things to different people; different meanings across a lifespan or two. 

Slowness, too, is a privilege.  While it shouldn’t be, it is.  The ability to pause in this world where so much focus on “time is money” is not so easily accessible.  For so many, slowness and success are mutually exclusive.

Home, from this current vantage point for me, needs to be both about cultivating joy and honoring that which is hard.  There is truth and beauty in hardness too.

Join me in this exploration of home.  What it is and is becoming for me. What it might be for you. And how we might cultivate space and opportunities for others. 

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