📿 Feeling at Home

Dropping in to what is familiar & Thich Nhat Hanh on our "True Home"

Hello you, Adreanna here with this week’s dispatch of The Laundry —

We spent the past weekend in New York City, which up until recently is the place that we called home. I use the word “recently” loosely here, knowing that time is relative, and that for me at least, time has also operated more loosely since weathering a pandemic and having a baby. The dependable, plodding, linear quality of time feels somewhat cracked, liquefied. Life seems to happen more in soupy fugue state than on a chronological timeline these days. 

From this perspective it feels like just a few moments ago that we left the city for the Hudson Valley, and just a few breaths since Covid shuttered the world. It has, in fact, been four years. This, incidentally, is the entire lifespan of the average city dwelling pigeon. The vibe shifts fast in New York, and while we’ve been making a life elsewhere, the city has rotated through an entire life cycle. 

Still. I feel at home in New York the moment that my feet hit the pavement. I suspect I might always feel at home here, having lived in this place for half of my life. The vibe in this city may shift often. But the essential nature remains constant, and it’s this essence that I know so well. I’ve come to think of it as a steady drum beat keeping time under a frolicking melody. 

This steady drum beat is kindred to the feeling I get of “dropping in” during my meditation practice. The vibe of my inner life changes quickly; my shifting moods, my fleeting thoughts, my quotidian preoccupations. Still. There is something essential below the melody that I’m able to drop into. Sometimes, I’m even able to reside in it. Call it presence. Call it awareness. Call it a feeing of home. 

Like any practice, what we do over and over and over again gets baked into the bones and shapes our sensibility until it just becomes second nature, whether it’s meditation or living in a city for so long that it becomes a part of us. Giving oneself over to an environment can also be a practice — a practice of carving out belonging, a practice of creating home. 

“Practice” implies that this process is intentional. But I’ve seen this kind of home-making happen in a way that’s unintentional, too. If we spend our time somewhere for long enough, there’s a transmission that’s bound to happen. For better or worse, our environment seeps into our psyche. Even if we’re reluctant participants, we come to feel at home in what’s familiar to us; in what we show up to again and again and again. This process of home-making goes for environments but also habits, people and ways of thinking.

Ruby was happily perched in a carrier strapped to Lodro’s torso for most of our trip. I wonder if she will one day also be invincible in her innocence and as sure as I was that moving to New York as a teenager is a good idea. Wherever she decides to make a home, I hope that she feels most at home within herself.

I hope that she’s unafraid of who she is, and that she trusts her essential nature enough to surf her shifting vibes.  I hope that her inner life is a refuge. I hope that she feels a sense of belonging wherever she goes because she’s already at home in her own skin. I hope for all of these things - but not so much so that she never feels a kinship with those who feel like outcasts. 

We visited friends and walked down streets saturated with sensory memory. The question of home - and what makes one feel at home - rattled through my mind. 

Is home just a sense of familiarity? 

Is it sparked by recognizable touchstones that put our mind at ease? 

Is home in the feeling of belonging somewhere — and the feeling of safety that’s implied in belonging? 

I considered the rush of victory that washed over me when we hit a long wave of green lights heading north on 6th Avenue. I’ve taken enough northbound cabs on the west side of Manhattan to know that you either catch that wave or stop and sit at every single red light. It’s all about pacing and timing. Is there a more intimate way of knowing a place than knowing it’s traffic patterns? I feel at home because I know the idiosyncrasies and quirks that are only revealed through time.

This sense of knowing has been one of the greatest blessings of my meditation practice. Developing a sense of familiarity with my inner life. Locating internal touchstones. Getting intimate with my idiosyncrasies—in part, because there’s no where to hide from myself in the stillness and silence. All prerequisites of sorts to feeling completely (mostly) at home. 

Before rolling our bags up to Penn Station and boarding the Amtrak back to our residence-home, we stopped at McNally Jackson bookstore in SoHo. I picked up a green paperback of Thich Nhat Hanh teachings, in part because he often writes of home, and the process of finding home, through the practice of meditation. I flipped through and found three pithy quotes that, when strung together, create a full teaching; below.

May we all know the feeling of home.

From Peace is This Moment by Thich Nhat Hanh:

“Our true home is the place where we no longer seek, no longer wish, no longer regret. Our true home isn’t in the past; it isn’t the object of our regrets, our yearning, our longing, or remorse. Our true home isn’t the future; it’s not the object of our worries, hopes, or fears. Our true home lies right in the present moment. If we can practice according to the teaching of the Buddha and return to right here and right now, then the energy of mindfulness will help us to establish our true home in the present moment.”

“Sometimes we feel that we aren’t in our true home because the person that we love isn’t there. We think that if we can be together with our beloved, we’ll feel more at home. But if we have not found our true home, then even when we’re with the person we love, we won’t feel at home. That’s why it’s important to find out true home first. Our true home is in our heart. And when we have found our true home, we feel at home anywhere we go.” 

“Whenever we wanted to run away and find something else, my teacher would tell us “Wherever you go, you will just find yourself.” We will just meet the difficulties, the loneliness, the sadness, and the suffering we already know.” Nothing is as effective as sitting there, returning to ourselves, and finding the elements of happiness and liberation right here in our own body and mind.” 

🛎 LAST CALL! In two weeks we’re gathering for our annual weekend meditation retreat in the bucolic Hudson Valley - just 2 hours north of NYC. If you want to go deeper with your meditation practice (or even recommit to it, fresh) I can’t think of a more supportive setting and community to do it in. You can find all of the retreat details HERE.