I was one of the lucky ones. When I lost my home, my boys were alive, off to school and thriving. And though I was shell shocked at nearly age fifty, I was healthy. I sat on the floor of a teensy studio apartment the size of a postage stamp, surrounded by my six animals, light years away from my beautiful old home in the Hollywood Hills, I knew this was a Cosmic Test that I wanted to learn and pass—though I thought seriously of tossing it all in. But I couldn’t. I had to feed six animals that depended on me.
Unlike so many Californians now suffering horrible losses, I didn’t lose my home of 25 years due to a blazing fire, but more of the incendiary ravages of divorce, bankruptcy, material losses that could have and almost devastated me forever.
What I had to learn on that long journey climbing up off the floor facing a new normal my life had become was this. That long-ago home I adored was still alive inside me. The memories of a lifetime raising children and animals and playing music and the tire on the tree and the playhouse and the Lionel train world in the attic and the holidays and all of it—they still lived. Whenever I wanted to revisit them they appeared warm and joyful filling my spirit with a gratitude knowing that they once were and would always be.
And though as Thomas Wolfe says, “You can’t go home again…,” in a way you can. Maybe not to what was your physical home, but to a deeper place within that is home to your soul. It never goes away. It’s there to offer you comfort and the knowing that if you created it once you can start again in a whole new way. Not to try and build that exact replica of the old home—some might be able to do that. But most of us might find ourselves in cabins and rentals and tents and small rooms and mobile homes, tiny studios and other places that will never be where we once were.
But look within. Breathe. And embrace the what is before you and savor both the memories and the beauty of incremental moments of life that are always there to soothe and hold us close.
Go home again. To YOU. The door is always open….
