“Can I feel your pulse?” she asks, reaching her hands across her desk to meet mine. I nod and stretch out my arms, wrists facing up. She places her thumbs there, in that open space, with tenderness and intention. She listens with her hands as her breath and mine synchronize without a word. A small, affirmative sound comes out of her.
“You don’t really have anything to anchor you right now, do you?” she asks, gazing into my eyes. She holds her attention here, contemplating my face as I feel a familiar flood rising. Something about the way she doesn’t flinch or squirm sends a signal of permission for the waters to surge.
“No, I don’t,” I reply. No full-time job, no romantic partnership, no children or caregiving duties, no political home. Nothing keeping me where I am. Nothing solid and no one else with whom to make future plans.
And the tears pour. I break. I hang my head. She releases my wrists and slides a box of tissues across the desk.
“Sorry, I’m a pretty weepy person sometimes,” I begin, ready to spout off my usual apologetic script – the one my ego has memorized, the one that automatically forms in my mouth in an attempt to obstruct the flow when I cry in front of someone new for the first time.
She interjects before I can continue. “It’s okay. It’s just chi moving.” Firm and resolute enough that there is no rebuttal for my ego to make. Maybe it is okay. Maybe it is just chi moving. Maybe there’s no reason to apologize for my tears.
“Well, I guess crying is my body’s preferred way of moving chi,” I joke.
“And it’s a perfect way to do that,” she replies.
She’s not laughing. Why am I making a joke of myself in front of someone who’s taking me seriously?
“Are you from here?” she continues. “Where is home?”
And the chi keeps moving.
“No, I’m not from here,” I manage to choke out of my dammed throat. “And home is, well, I’ve lived in a lot of places, but I don’t really have…”
“Home is complicated,” she says, mercifully finishing my sentence, speaking what I cannot.
“It is,” I reply. She nods, sees me, sits with me.
I’m in her office because I’m in pain and seeking a relief that no Western medicine has afforded me. I had no idea that an acupuncturist I consulted for physical pain would tap into one of my core emotional wounds right away. But I suppose I shouldn’t be surprised. I, of all people, who understands how deeply the body is affected by the emotional pain that we attempt to suppress. And the pain of feeling not at home has been with me for my whole life.
“Where are you from?”
A question that I always know is coming when I meet someone new. A question that always generates a small cyclone of anxiety in the pit of my stomach.
I’ve been in writing workshops with facilitators who have asked me to write the sounds of my hometown. To listen for and write in a cadence that evokes home. I’ve felt like an imposter in these moments. Trying to choose which place to name. Straining to approximate what ultimately always feels out of reach. I recently had a dream reminiscent of such workshop spaces, a dream in which I lamented the fact that I was the only writer in the room who didn’t feel that she had a home to hear, a home from which to write.
I can name the city where I was born, and the other city where I was raised. But I fear that people can sense the ache of empty space that I carry when I speak of them.
“I was born in Philly, but mostly raised in Portland.”
Can you feel it? How hollow that sounds?
My connection to these locations is faint and ever fading. They’re technically my hometowns, but I hardly know them as an adult. Not the way that you’re meant to know a place you call home.
I arrived in this lifetime on this Earth in Philadelphia, to a father who was born and raised in the city and a mother who arrived there as a teenager after leaving her own broken home in the Northern Neck of Virginia. I can remember three different houses, three different parts of the Philly metro area, three different elementary schools, before my family moved across the country to Portland, Oregon. I was a few months away from my ninth birthday then, in the middle of third grade. The Portland years themselves were also split, between a modest house and public schools in Northeast Portland, and a big house and private high school in the suburbs. I was born in Philly and raised in Portland, but the years spent in each homeplace were full of dispersal and uproot.
I never learned how to settle as a child. Always prepared to pick up and go again.
We lived in Portland as a family until I graduated from high school. My parents announced that they were getting divorced as soon as I, their youngest child, left the house and moved away for college. I left home, and home vanished. My mother moved to Maryland, closer to her family in the DMV area. My father remained in Portland, moving into a condo before eventually getting his own house. When I would go “home” for holiday breaks during college and beyond, it was to my mother’s house in Maryland – not home for me, because I hadn’t grown up there, but the home that she attempted to create for her young adult children after the wreckage. The 301 area code that I still carry with me in my cellphone number speaks to where she landed, but not to where I’ve lived. When I meet a new person and they seek connection through place – “oh, you have a 301-area code, you’re from Maryland, too?” – I always feel like I’m disappointing them by answering that, no, I’m not.
Philly isn’t home because I was so young when I left. Portland isn’t home because I left and hardly ever go back. My memories of my life in each place are fuzzy. I almost recognize these places, almost recognize my younger selves, when I’m there. I desperately search for the remaining landmarks of my childhood.
“Can we drive down Broad Street past Freedom Theatre?” I ask when I visit with family in Philly, wanting to see the place where I first studied as a young artist at summer performing arts camps. It’s still there, that 3-story brownstone, though the building is under state conservatorship and the only productions in recent years have been virtual. Like so many Black cultural institutions, my former artistic home has floundered as it struggles for resources to stay afloat in a once predominately Black neighborhood, now gentrified and overtaken by university expansion. It remains, but a phantom of itself.
“I want to go by Fernwood,” I say on the rare occasions that I see my dad in Portland, wanting to reconnect with my middle school self. But my old middle school no longer exists. The building still stands, another 3-story structure, but it now houses a K-8 grammar school under a different name. Like so many other public school systems, Portland Public Schools have floundered and sought to conserve resources by closing and consolidating campuses. It remains, but as a version of itself that I’ve never known. Another phantom.
My anchors are there, but they’re also not.
Someone I briefly dated once turned my nomadic life history into a brain teaser, her attempt to list out in order all of the places where I’ve lived. Philly. Portland. Atlanta. New York. Baltimore. Boston. Austin. And, for the past six years, Oakland.
It was here in Oakland that my body finally broke down. Here that my body said, “you can’t keep moving like this.”
The reason why I moved here – a job – is gone, no longer something that my body can sustain. The reasons why I thought I would stay here – relationships – have come and gone. I’m here now because I don’t know where else I would go. I’m here now because it’s the longest I’ve been in one place since I left the home that vanished when I was eighteen. I’m here now because…well…why am I here?
I haven’t studied much astrocartography – the practice of mapping your birth chart onto the world map to see which planetary energies influence us in specific locations – but I do know that both Portland and the Bay Area lie very close to my Saturn MC line.
I think about the astrological themes of Saturn – reality, responsibility, limits and restrictions, control and mastery, endings and separations, elders and aging, loss and death – and I wonder if my coming to and remaining in the Bay Area has served the purpose of me returning to this line as an adult to take responsibility for my inner child. The girl I left behind in Portland. To feel fully the grief of the endings, the separations, the loss of home over and over, that she had to suppress. To feel what she didn’t have the capacity to feel because she was too busy trying to be good. To finally recognize the limitations of her body, rather than masking them in an effort to try to achieve her way out of her pain. To learn how to create structure, routines, and life rhythms that actually support her body instead of working against it. To allow that chi to flow.
On astro.com, the description for the Saturn MC line reads, in part:
In these regions, there is a good chance of coming closer to finding your true destiny. You divorce yourself from misleading illusions or false ideals, and focus your efforts on solving attending problems. Step by step, you make your long-term projects come true.
I don’t know what my true destiny is, though I do feel closer to it now than I did when I moved here. Here I have divorced myself from the illusion that my true destiny lies in a job or a relationship. Here I have divorced myself from the illusion that I could pass – pass as straight, pass as neurotypical, pass as normal, pass as a high-achieving professional fully capable of pushing her body to the limit to conform to the mandates of capitalism.
And the long-term project? Perhaps it is grief. The project of finally allowing myself to grieve all that I lost as a child. The project of tending to those old wounds as they’ve been triggered by the endings and separations I’ve experienced here.
It feels strange to say that the thing that’s keeping me here, the thing that’s anchoring me, is grief. But perhaps it’s not strange to Saturn. Perhaps Saturn has offered me a gift through grief, here in this place.
The gift of time alone to feel myself, face myself, hold myself.
The gift of honoring my transition into middle age by taking responsibility for my self-mastery.
The gift of learning that my own body is the only anchor I will ever really have in this life. And even that anchor will change, will experience pain and illness and disability, will become unrecognizable to me, will one day no longer exist.
The gift of facing the reality that I’ve moved so much because moving is all I’ve ever known. The reality that there may not ever be a physical location that feels like home to me because I probably wouldn’t even know how to recognize it if I ever found it.
In a world in which a Black woman with a mental illness, who called for help as she was trying to assess what was or wasn’t real, what was or wasn’t a threat to the home of her body, can be executed by the state in her own kitchen for evoking her spiritual power…what home could I, could we, truly have here?
In a world in which a governor can order state agencies to clear encampments, with the blessing of a Supreme Court that has criminalized being unhoused in a country in which most all of us are one small, quotidian tragedy away from losing our housing…what does having a home even mean when it can be taken away and that loss can be pinned on us as a crime?
Saturn offers me the gift of facing and feeling every aspect our shared reality, and how my own life has been shaped by it. And what is reality but an illusion that we all agree to share?
“Where is home?” she asked me.
I didn’t know what to say. But I finally let myself cry about it. And in that moment those tears, that chi, was where I belonged. My own body processing the deepest wounds of my own heart was my home.
Out of each of my wounds, I’ve come to recognize corresponding gifts. I am from nowhere. I have no home. But being from nowhere means that I’m from everywhere. Everywhere I go. Perhaps a lesson I agreed to learn in this lifetime is to remember that home is my body. I have longed so deeply for home as a space outside of myself, a space into which my body fits. Perhaps Saturn is teaching me to take responsibility for the experience of integrating home within myself. The experience of facing the reality that home is not, was not, will never be a place other than my own flesh. The experience of learning to fit inside of myself.
Loss is painful. Losing the things that I held onto as anchors has been painful. Facing the reality that the things I’ve been taught to seek as anchors under capitalism were never really that - could never really be that, were all always fleeting by nature - is painful. It is no wonder that my body is experiencing so much physical pain. The pain is currently my anchor. The gift of the pain is that it has left me no choice but to return to my body. No choice but to prioritize my body over anything external to which I would have once tried to cling. And in returning to my body, I’m remembering that I’m home wherever I go.
I hold gratitude for the pieces of that home that I’ve recovered in every location in which my body has landed, has grounded, has connected with other bodies.
I hold gratitude for the lessons of this Saturn line. For my growing up and into an adult who is capable of tending to my younger selves.
For as long as there are lessons for me to learn from Saturn, I’ll remain here. And if I know anything for sure about how my life unfolds, it’s that I’ll always know when it’s time to move on.
Here’s the song that inspired the title of this post. “Homebody,” by Nai Palm. She’s been very open about her experiences of grief, loss, housing insecurity. And from this pain, she sings about the home we can find within ourselves when all else is stripped away. The lyrics:
Hold on to the color in your day
I will always be around to reach your pain
Home is where you don't have to carry all of the worry
You don't have to bury all of the memories
Hold on, love, hold on, love, hold on, love, hold on, love
Hold on, love, to, onto each other when you can
Time will always come around to meet you with the answers
Home is in your body
Homebody
Another Saturn keyword is time. And I’m so grateful that, as Nai Palm says, time has come around to meet me with the only possible answer.
“Where is home?”
“Here,” I reply, with my hands over my heart. “Home is, was, always will be here.”
It's like you read my mind down fren. lol a remarkable read 💕 thank you so much for sharing it 🫶🏽
Absolutely love this encouragement!