Make Yourself at Home
My beautywalk home, April 2023 photo by Sandra Butel
I am Sandra Butel and this is my beautywalk.
beautywalk is my ongoing attempt to appreciate the present moment and accept and embrace all the conditions of my current life. I offer up mixed metaphors and interior meanderings to anyone who wishes to find their own sense of beauty and wonder in their own lives. May we all find home.
What is home?
Over the last year I have moved from place to place in one of two ways: 1) my true blue Mazda 3 filled with a suitcase, large Cotopaxi backpack in all its multicoloured uniqueness, a smaller backpack with personal items, yoga mat and bolster, various thrift store finds and my grocery items or 2) by plane, train, bus and/or walking with only my Cotopaxi and a small backpack. As I wander around North America and Europe I find myself reviewing and assessing my assumptions about what home is to me.
As with my last blog where I found a way to move past my preconceived notions of a resort village and make myself at home there, I am now faced with the opposite type of space to rest my head. An ultra modern, $ million+ house in a new development close to the ocean outside of Victoria. The house sits on the edge of a rocky promontory in and amongst a smattering of boxy modern houses in various shades of neutrals - grey and brown. Trees surround the area and there are some beautiful walks to be had nearby. The neighbourhoods are strangely free of sidewalks and places for people to be, seemingly having been designed for cars and not for pedestrians. I did find one little stretch of sidewalk on my walk yesterday with the 3 dogs Simon, Henry and Wyatt, but the rest of the time we walked on the street.
The topic of home is a deeper dive and is the thread that flows through all of my blogs.
So what is home?
And why am I asking this question in my life now?
The last year has been one filled with extensive travel and moving from place to place, sometimes petsitting and sometimes just picking places and people that I want to visit and renting spaces to come back to at the end of my days adventuring.
The Three Musketeers - Henry, Simon & Wyatt by Sandra Butel
Where is home? No fixed Ad-dress
Part of this voyage has been about delving into the discomfort I feel at continuing to call Regina “home”. That place where I have spent the last 30+ years just does not fit right anymore. Like a favourite dress that has been left too long in the dryer it feels tight and itchy and uncomfortable. I tried to make it fit for a while by pulling at it as I wore it around the house to see if I could stretch it out to its former glory again but no dice, it simply doesn’t fit me anymore.
This is where the metaphor shifts towards the actual dwellings in which I have been spending my time. Whether in a 500 year old thatched cottage, or a mobile home, or a $14 million Silicon Valley home complete with pool and tennis courts, or a converted stable full of hand made pottery and exquisite art from all around the world, or the open concept home designed by an architect and an interior designer that was sitting on top of a mountain overlooking the river below or any of the other places I have rested my body in the last 12 months, I have found a comfortable fit in all of them.
I have come to see that home is a feeling that I carry around inside of me and when I am asked where I am from I feel at ease saying “wherever I am at the moment”.
So where is home?
For me, home is a sense of comfort and safety and belonging that I can take with me wherever I go. It is the ease with which I settle into a new space. There is, of course, the initial discomfort and the initial challenge of putting aside the judgments that inevitably pop up in my saboteur brain. The judgments about how the house is arranged and where it is located and the nagging sense that there is one right choice that I should have known how to make out of the many that were open to me.
The challenge starts with adapting to change and seeing fully what is, accepting it for what it is, and getting curious about what this place and this time and these circumstances, including the pets, have to offer me and teach me.
What is the growth that I will find within myself in this new space?
What are the gifts that are on offer to me inside these four walls?
Spring Magnolias in the neighbourhood by Sandra Butel
Beyond Walls - Conversation with a Stranger at the Border
It has become clear to me that my comfort with ongoing change is about having faith in our ability as human beings (with concerted effort) to adapt to great change and to move beyond the idea of sameness that we have come to associate with home. This concept was highlighted in my conversation with a new Kenyan friend that I met in a restaurant in Port Angeles right across from the ferry terminal.
We started by talking about what we were doing in Port Angeles and soon we were talking about our lives and our homes and the belief systems that were embedded in us at a very young age. Many things struck me about this open and honest conversation. The one that has most stuck with me was his understanding of the North American mindset and his deep empathy with the white people around him that were reacting to him with a lack of understanding and often blatant prejudice. His idea was that North Americans have been taught that home is a small space where you are known and where everyone looks like you. Where you are bombarded with stories and images that make it impossible not to believe that everything outside of that small space is a real threat to your safety and your ability to be at ease with where you fit in the world. Thus spending any time investigating outside of your 4 walls and the belief systems that form the foundation of your sense of yourself is something that is just too difficult to do.
He went on to say that in his upbringing in Kenya he had learned all about the rest of the vast continent of Africa and he could still recite the gross domestic product and the many languages spoken in most of the 56 countries. He had also learned about the rest of the world in the same way and felt the privilege of his deeper education. He was aware that very few North Americans have the same type of education as he had had. How, then, could he hold them in judgment for their ignorance and their lack of ability to look outside of themselves? This belief is at the root of everything they have ever been told about themselves and is going to take some deep work before it can be shifted. His sense was that for most people it is beyond their capacity for learning and growth and he was focusing on accepting the way that they are and not spending energy judging them or wanting them to be different.
Across Borders (mural by Cory Each) photo Sandra Butel
Sharing Space
Of course there is the initial feeling of awkwardness and the sense that I am an intruder when I arrive in a new space. I often have an overnight with the owners and we share food and wine as we get to know one another and as the animals are eased into spending time with a new human. I am surprised each time that even though there is some unease in these meetups, mostly I feel okay with meeting new people and being in their space. I cannot imagine myself a few years ago finding any of this interaction with strangers enjoyable. I had started to believe the idea that I had to defend myself against the differences that I saw in other people’s lives and belief systems and that my safety had to do with sticking with what I knew and those people and lifestyles that matched my own. Now, like my Kenyan friend, I find myself curious and empathetic as I learn more about the world and the people around me and as I open myself to different ways of seeing the world and our place in it. My judgments of myself, of others, and of the situations I find myself in still come but more distantly, like they are calling to me across the calm waters of my inner peace.
I recently decided to make it official that I am a citizen of the world and attempted to delete Regina, Saskatchewan as my home on my online profiles. This was much more difficult than I thought as the algorithm really wants to know where we are so it can feed us the proper marketing for things that are nearby. While Regina holds a lot of my loved ones and dear friends and while I had so many wonderful experiences there I know without a doubt that there is more out there for me.
More dresses to try on as I search for the one that fits my new curves and muscles and celebrates the colourful new life that I am building. I had thought to find myself one dress that would last me forever and have realized, in my shopping around, that there are many many wonderful dresses that will suit me just fine. It isn’t so much about how the dress itself fits but rather about the ease with which my body now rests within a variety of styles and colours and shapes. In letting go of trying to squeeze myself into the latest style that everyone else was wearing, I have found freedom. The freedom to be me as I twirl yet another skirt, hands in pockets, and feel the flow of the material on my skin and the air playfully tickling my legs.
Self-Reflections by Sandra Butel
Questions for Self-Reflection
What or where is home to you?
What one step can you take today to feel more at home in your own body? Your own mind? Your own spirit?
What can you do to accept your current ad-dress?
What can you do to venture out to find a unique style that suits you better?
If you want to do a deep dive into finding home within yourself book yourself in for a free 1 hour beautywalk coaching discovery session with me.
https://calendly.com/sandrabutel/free-beautywalk-session
Postscript.
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