Finding home

I am sitting in the attic of a small wooden cabin in Wayanad. It has been a beautiful day and ‘tose naina milaike’ is playing in my mind. I don’t know why Khusro has taken over all of a sudden. There’s no Hindi or Urdu where I am. But there is the forest, the stream that never sleeps, the fireflies, the green pepper that I have been plucking and making tea with, the plentiful stars. May be that is the effect of these things - the body begins to feel at home and language - well, language mostly feels unnecessary but when it comes, it comes in songs and poetry of the familiar kind.

I feel a gloom as I sing Khusro in my heart - I have always felt a loss of home - not so much a loss as an absence. I was never grounded in a sense of place. And on top of that, I am a porous person. I don’t know if I can explain this to you but I have always been - kind of permeable. People, places, languages, silences, absences and presences seep through me. So the sense of self that the worldly existence requires of us has been difficult to find. I was also never taught how to be in the world so I feel like I am still figuring it out and will continue to. My heart is my primary sensory organ and I am learning to trust it more and more. I am learning to be in my body more and more and it surprises me often how vast this field of the body and its perceptions is. This fluid self has bothered me often, has made me feel a bit underconfident to claim my space in the world.

But as I grow older, a surprising thing is happening. I had expected to find more solidity, but instead, I am finding a comfort, a moving anchor in the vast, fluid field of the heart within me. I am finding comfort in being the many many things that I am and in the fact that no other human will ever truly understand or see all parts of me. I will be lucky if I can see them and love them all. This is a liberating place, a place from where I do not feel the need to make myself legible to be understood. I feel comfortable with you meeting only the parts of me that you can bear to experience and with being not understood often. It liberates me of the need to fit into tiny boxes - to brand myself for you - because I trust that in the world that is healed, and in the path to that world, in the world that is healing, we need to trust each other’s ability to hold complexity, starting with the complexity of our own humanness.

So this field within me, this place of vastness and multiplicity and shadow and light - this is the home I am finding.