The journey to home: finding peace and inspiration in the places that hold my roots
I am one of the few people I know who actually likes living out of a suitcase. Really. Something about being portable and ready to move, with just a handful of my earthly possessions makes me feel free and excited, which makes me feel most like myself. For most of the summers of my adult life, it has been my habit to hop on a flight on the last day of school and spend the next six or seven weeks living out of suitcase. In these empty nest years, traveling from my East Coast life to my West Coast life means visiting my family, catching up with some of my oldest and dearest friends and getting reacquainted with the spectacular beauty of the Pacific Northwest. It is a trip that is part pilgrimage and part outdoor adventure; part remembering and part exploring. It fills my heart and fills my cup and has not only become a centerpiece at the feast of my life, but also a central part of my idea of myself: an adventurous independent soul, equally happy and comfortable in the wild landscape of my beloved Oregon and in the wild landscape of my adopted home, New York City—and, just as importantly—in the journey in between.
I’ve always loved T.S. Eliot’s words, “the mixing of memory and desire” and find myself thinking of those words often as I try to frame these trips in the narrative of my life. It’s no big mystery why I visit my faraway family and carve out time for my dearest friends, but I’ve been thinking lately about what brings me back, year after year, to those old familiar places? Even when the people I love are no longer there? Even when they require long drives and finding places to stay? This summer, as I spent a few days alone in a cabin in the Oregon High Desert and then, later, a couple of days near Mt. Hood and then a week later, the Oregon Coast, I thought about why it feels so important, year after year, to spend solo time in these places. These sacred places that often make my heart ache with deep nostalgia and longing, while at the same time, fill it with the most profound comfort and inspiration I know.
And then I read something that really hit home and although I can’t, for the life of me, find the reference, I clearly remember the central idea:
Maybe traveling back to the places we loved when we were young is not about nostalgia or longing, but about returning to the places that make us feel most like ourselves. Maybe it’s about revisiting the places that hold our roots—the places that grew us into the very people we are and shaped the essence of our being. In returning to these places, we are not simply taking a stroll down memory lane, we’re nurturing our root systems and remembering the most elemental foundations of our lives.
When you get to be my age, the memories of childhood may be beautiful, or not, but either way, they are almost always twinged with something irrevocably changed or lost forever. I can think of no perfect summer day of my youth on Mt. Hood, without remembering my dear brother, Richie, who passed away only a few years later. Although I’ve spent countless summer days in the Oregon High Desert in recent years, every moment there is both richer and more heartbreaking because my late Mother and I spent so much time together there.
Visiting these places doesn’t make these feelings less potent; in fact, it brings them to me in ways that make my chest ache and my legs wobbly. At the same time, the visceral reaction I have to these places makes me feel deeply alive—and deeply like myself. The familiar scent of the Oregon High Desert in the late afternoon wind, the glance of light in the forest on Mt. Hood or the feeling of the fog rolling in during a morning walk on the Oregon Coast are so deeply etched in my soul that experiencing them now feels a lot like coming home. They remind me and they inspire me. They make me feel something that I don’t feel anywhere else and help me know that these places not only belong to me, but I belong to them.
So, I guess that’s why I return, year after year, summer after summer to these lovely and sacred places in my home state of Oregon—to dig deep into my own root system and to understand the ways that it will always hold me, while at the same time, filling me with the kind of wonder and inspiration I can put in my suitcase and take along with me to every other place I go.
