Arriving Home
Tomorrow’s events:
Collective Presencing. Every Tuesday @ 2:00 AM ET. RSVP here. 90 mins.
Collective Journaling. Daily @ 8:00 AM ET. Patreon event. 90 mins.
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November 15th, 2021
I am feeling homeless.
I have been waking up in the mornings, disorientated, seeing a foggy Danish sky. My mind slowly adjusts...
Oh, I am in Copenhagen.
I feel my body, a sadness within. My mind starts to wander with questions…
Where are we going? Where will we end up? Why are we here?
To sense what is behind these questions: the feeling of not having a home is present, along with a deep longing to be home. If we were in vacation mode, then the sadness would not be here. All these beautiful sights, while seeing these attractive, happy, and maskless Danes, are distracting us, putting us in vacation mode. We are not here for a vacation though. Saying we are here for vocation feels like the better thing to say.
The mystery of being here is still being a mystery. Before leaving Canada I was musing we were coming to Europe to “come home,” and finding a home was the theme for my constellation session that Ole Bjerg facilitated yesterday in his office. We were supposed to test out his money constellation experience but me feeling homeless felt most alive. You are apparently not supposed to talk about a constellation after it is over, so I will be respecting that rule. It was a powerfully elegant experience, providing additional support to my emerging story of where home actually is.
There is no map for traveling consciously with a daemonic-fueled uncertainty. I confess there are moments where we both want to head back to Canada. It is only during the sad moments though. This feels true to write: sadness is the only thing calling me to come back to Canada. This sadness does not feel like my own and sadness is not a good foundation for a home.
Sadly, many people have sadness as the foundation for their sense of home. Beside the sadness, other unpleasant emotional states are there: anxiety, resentment, loneliness. Many people today feel more lonely with others than when they are alone; it is especially painful when this happens at home.
The foundation of home. What should that be? Love, obviously. I am almost past the point of caring how cliché that feels to write, because the sense of truth here is more important than appearing cool, and love as the foundation of a home feels like the true thing to write. There is something else here to consider, beyond the emotional foundation, and that is the locality of home. The physical location is important of course, as you want to be in a place that can bring life, and perhaps make a life.
There is something deeper than a physical location though. I am seeing my body these days as a simple instrument for tapping into the daemon, to see where He is asking me to go. I am seeing these digital nomadic blues as a way for my body to tell me we need to reorient in our travels. Our last day in Copenhagen is Saturday; we are not going to Oslo anymore, nor will we be continuing our city-hopping around Europe.
In terms of a physical location, we are here to find a temporary home, one that is good enough. Portugal, on paper and from experience, meets all of our criteria for a temporary good enough home, so we’ll be returning there. In terms of spiritual location, the question of what home is still remains unanswered. There was a line from a recent entry that I sense is somehow connected to this…
We are approaching our next move in our travels like how I approach what the next word will be in these journals: sensing deeply into the directionality of the daemon, aka the “prima materia” of creation itself, treating our travel adventures as art.
Prima materia is a phrase from alchemy referring to the first matter upon which everything starts. It is the thing one needs the capacity to rest upon in order to turn shit into gold. I have so far been understanding whatever this thing I am referring to as the “daemon” as some kind of guiding energy. Socrates’ daemon famously told him what not to do; mine seems to tell me what to do.
When I asked Bonnitta about the daemon in her “Origins of the Self: An Integrated Model” lecture, she said the daemon was a “universal energy,” welling up inside someone, encouraging them where to go. It encourages us to go towards what feels most authentic. Culture bumps heads with the daemon often, force-fitting people in societal roles, bringing forth an authenticity gap, which we all suffer from.
There are no models we can use to understand where the daemon is asking us to go. This is probably why I obsessively learned so many models. This homeless feeling is making me reconsider my relationship with the daemon however. I just noticed something related to this relational reconsideration…
I am in a coffee shop in Copenhagen right now, journaling a little later than I normally do. I popped into the Collective Journaling session at The Stoa, which I have not been to in a while given all the time zone changes. I felt welcoming energy right away, the kind you get when showing up to a familiar place, surprising people who care about you. It felt like being home, and the sense of being homeless melted away.
These Collective Journaling sessions, along with The Stoa itself, were created from me listening to the daemon. They are living creations, with people temporarily living in them, breathing life into them. Regardless of how transient these creations are, they are providing a home for people. Not a physical home of course.
When the sense of homelessness hits, I feel a sadness, which feels like a mother’s sadness in the face of a primordial separateness. I am learning to do something though. I am learning to sink real deep, into what is underneath this separateness. This is the thing that is bringing tears to my eyes right now. I used to think the daemon was the thing that tells me to “go here.” Now I know the daemon is the thing that makes me feel here. It is the thing that is home.
I sense I have finally arrived.
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