My heart pounded when we got to the front door of our condo. I felt as if I didn't know what I would see behind it, that was the strangest part. What kind of changes or surprises was I expecting? But we opened the door into our old home (and yet a relatively new home--we were newly moved right before we left to travel), and then it was with the greatest relief that I stumbled in and looked around at the scene we had so carefully set up before our departure. The furnishings and easy flow of energy were exactly as I remembered, so lovely to be home, such a stark contrast to the previous months' travel.
But when I woke up this morning, I felt off-balance in my own space. I don't know how to explain it properly, I was just out of my element being in my element. So many hours of movement and so many different beds and bus seats which had served as my bed and now I was still. I found myself oddly unsettled in my very own sheets, waking up to the blinding, buttery California sunshine bathing my bedroom. Why did it all feel so foreign? Musky air from my absence and incense on my shelves, they irked my senses as I awoke and started investigating my little spatial world. Thailand, only two weeks ago, a foreign place that had started to feel so familiar, and now I was back and reorienting myself to the sensory experience of being in a place that should feel like home, but didn't quite yet...
It was the smell of basil dishwashing soap, familiar and surprisingly delicious in its familiarity, that returned me to a surprising sense of stability. It awoke in me old habits of starting my mornings early with washing the dishes and cleaning the counters in anticipation of a new day and new beginnings. Basil dishwashing soap. Who could have guessed that it would be such a comforting and grounding sort of aroma? In fact all the smells I encountered this morning were amazingly affective, my senses waking up to the perfumes and soaps of my space, bringing me back to a real sense of belonging...I felt more animal than human as I investigated them all.
I brushed my hands over surfaces, straightened pillows, opened and closed drawers, reexamined old images from memories that seemed long past and continued--and continue--to come flooding back with the aggressive hereandnow of being home. It's not just reorienting myself to this space, it's coming to terms with the fact that I am at the end of something powerful, and knowing that the world is the same and not the same, and that I am different and not all that different, but I am back in a little world that is, for all intensive purposes, mine to settle into again. All that anxiety I felt when I stood outside my front door, wondering with nonsensical apprehension if I would know the space awaiting me inside, all that anxiety has been slowly slipping away as I wander back and forth through the inner doorways of my apartment. I am finally realizing and falling in love again with stillness. It is another gift from the trip, to feel peace at the end of so much movement, a savasana of grand proportions.
