Much of my life, I have been obsessed with a longing for home. Literally. I have bought, swapped, remodeled, and left so many houses, apartments, attics, cottages, and even a half-remodeled haunted Victorian, that I find myself unable to remember them all.

My late teens through my late thirties are striated with couches, pedestal sinks, paint cans, a jack hammer, a neighbor who blasted rap music every Sunday, a neighbor named Halcyon, a neighbor who gave me a Van Briggle pitcher, a spontaneous courtyard party after an earthquake, two picket fences, neighborhood watch meetings, weekend graffiti paint-outs, Montecito garden parties, Easter egg hunts (one before I had Lilly), four gardens, four cats, three dogs, rats skittering (Gainesville and Montecito), seals barking (Bainbridge), garage doors opening, Dad’s voice calling “Jenny, are you home?”

And through it all, there I stood, echoing with longing.

For near 30 years, this terribly fierce longing baffled me. Why did I last only one night in the college dorm, renting a tiny furnished apartment the next day, then arranging and rearranging the furniture? Why did I acquire a Rhodesian Ridgeback at 23 and walk that dog past the mansions of Hancock Park before work every morning and evening, not because I dreamed of being rich or married, but because I ached for what those houses represented to me?

Safety. Dependableness. Belonging.

Looking back at my younger me, I feel such tenderness for her appetite. But, at the time, I just felt weird.

I made myself wrong for my longing to belong; I wanted so much to feel at home, with myself and with others, that I didn’t realize how nearly universal the longing for home is.

I didn’t realize I exiled myself from belonging my making my longing for home wrong.

This morning, taking a break from struggling to write this – my writing skills are not equal to the force of feeling roiling in me – I realized I have lived here, on this island, in this house, the longest of any – 9 years.

I have lived here not because it is my dream house or because I love it but because I, slowly, became determined to stay put.

By staying put, imperfectly and with resistance, I have, of course, partially met a part of my longing. I have used staying put as a way to come to myself.

Yet another part of my longing still burbles with hankering: the part of me that is ready to invite myself to belong. To open my home (metaphorically) to others, and to the Other.

Because, doh, the gravel bottom of my longing is for that which can never be known.

Or as the great Rumi said,

I didn’t come here of my own accord, and I can’t leave that way.

Whoever brought me here, will have to take me home.

I’ll stop now and go listen to the echo, but instead of looping back on itself and losing me in the process, I follow it… maybe, for one breath, all the way home.