✨ COMING HOME ✨

Many years ago, when I was a child
dreaming up my future life,
I used to imagine my perfect fairytale home,
nestled amongst the trees, on a hillside
by a blue ocean, with fruit trees and gardens
and flowers and birds.
Good people around me.
Happy children.
Music everywhere.

But life took me down other paths
I couldn’t have imagined, and for many years
that dream became a distant memory
of a time when I believed
in fairytales.

Many years and four children
into the adventures and challenges of
my uncharted journey through life,
I found myself homeless for six months.
I had no home, no job, no money.
Just the canvas walls of my tent,
a car, my violin –
and my breastfeeding baby,
my toddler,
my two older children.

Princes and ratbags had come and gone.
Rental houses and jobs had come and gone.
I’d been scrambling for stability
as an unwilling urban nomad,
yearning for a place to call home,
struggling and grieving
for lost dreams and the life
I longed for.

Yet my heart was still beating music.
I was still loving.
I was exhausted but
not broken.

Somehow amidst all of
the uncertainty, I realised:
if home is where the heart is,
maybe I didn’t need to find my home,
maybe I could create it
right there.

I might not have the life I’d dreamed of,
but what if I could create my dreams
with what I had?

Something quietly began growing in me,
a sense of possibility and
appreciation for what
I did have.

My cup might not be brimming over,
but it was half full, not half empty!

Perhaps gratitude wasn’t simply
a response to good things happening,
but could be a way of seeing things,
a choice in how we meet life.

With growing excitement,
I went out and bought myself some
fruit trees and big ceramic pots
to plant them in.

I didn’t have a place
to put my roots down, but life
is too short to wait to grow fruit!

I bought colourful cushions
and good food.
A friend built me a fire-bath,
and connected a hose
to an outdoor sink.

I turned that chapter of homelessness
into an adventure full of fun and freedom,
picnics outside on the grass, laughter with
my babies, and growing gratitude
for the simple joys of my life:
hot baths under the stars,
healthy children,
a beautiful and peaceful place to camp,
and the good food on our tin plates.

And somehow, the more I practiced gratitude
for what I already had, the less I felt like
I was waiting for something else.

I began to see beauty
and richness everywhere.
Home began to feel less like a distant dream,
and more like a state of being:
delighting in the small magics of life,
like the call of a bird,
a child’s laughter,
a full belly.

Life had given me some
lemons for sure, but I was learning how
to make some really great lemonade!

Soon after that, miracles began to happen.
An empty house appeared on a hillside
in a forest by a blue ocean surrounded by
trees and flowers and good people
in a village known locally as
the village of the birds.

Someone asked if I was interested
in living there and, even though
I didn’t have the means and there seemed to be
100 reasons why it was impossible,
I said yes.

Because sometimes, all you can do
is say yes to life –
and trust.

This has been my home now for several years!

I planted my fruit trees in the ground.
My children thrive.
Birds eat out of our hands.
Flowers grow and
music is everywhere.

Of course, there are still
challenges too sometimes,
life is life and we are
all human.

But every single day I wake up
and, for a moment,
wonder if I’m dreaming!

Every day I’m swept up in waves
of heartfelt gratitude for the magic
that brought me home, not just for the
extraordinary magic that brought me
to my house in the forest,
but to the deeper magic that
happened along the way.

Because home, I learned,
is not simply a place we
finally arrive at.
It’s what we create along the way,
even with very little.

It’s the courage to plant a fruit tree,
even if we don’t know where
we will be next.

And sometimes, after searching for
home all our lives, we find it’s
been here all along, in our own making of it,
in gratitude for the simple joys
of this life, in the home
of the heart.

✨ 🤍 ✨