It feels like home. More than home feels like home these days if I am honest. Home is this weird shitshow now. Life as we have known it is being upended, and it feels less and less like a home I can feel in my soul.
No, I am not moving to New Zealand...yet.
The solution isn’t to move away from, it is always move toward. And that is what New Zealand is teaching me with all its raw and natural beauty. Home is a place that you reside within, but also resides within you. You take the idea of home wherever you go. It is a place but it is also a mental space that is housed within you. Home can be a place of solace, a battleground, a place you never want to leave or a place you are desperately trying to escape.
I miss my home. But I also feel very peaceful in this place, this land that is so far away from everything. I like that, a lot. I like the feeling that things are far away. Politics, people, responsibilities, a life I am not sure exactly what to do with anymore. What exactly is a normal reaction to aging? Date a 30 year old? Get a sports car? Quit your job and run away to New Zealand?
Those things are all possible and I have tried many of them...fuck, ok, I have tried all of them, except the last one. And while the idea of moving here is alluring, it isn’t what I want, at least not yet.
I guess where I am today is that wherever you go there you are. And I will be exactly the same person with the same issues here as I am in California. Changing where I reside will solve some problems, yes, but it will also just create new ones. And while it is easy to think those other problems will be better problems, they are still problems, they just appear cuter and more reasonable because they aren’t real, yet.
The older I get the idea of a geographic becomes overwhelming. Like there would be so much work involved to make it happen and I just don’t really have the energy for it anymore. I like travel, but I also like coming home. If I was going to completely rearrange my life, New Zealand would be the place...no doubt in my mind. This country and its rolling beauty feels like a place I could call home.
But in truth, I miss home. I miss the people I love that love me back. I miss my routines, my pets, my family. And while I scatter a bit of my wanderlust all over New Zealand, and spend kilometers thinking about moving here, I am grateful to have a home to return to that is loving, safe, beautiful and mine.
Hands down New Zealand is my favorite of the trip. It is the first country I have been to that doesn’t feel foreign. It feels like a new kind of home. But I know I am not done with the old home yet. I miss the landscape of a place where my life has deepened, grown and morphed into this amazing life I have.
But while I have a few days left in this most amazing New Zealand, I am going to soak it all in and revel in the fact that I got to see it this once, and hopefully again. Perhaps the idea of home is something we carry with us, everywhere we roam. And that less and less home is a place but a feeling we take with us wherever we wander. Home is a place that resides within us, no matter the geography. And if we can feel that, we are home no matter where we find ourselves in this amazing, beautiful world.
Today, my home is New Zealand and I shall soak it all in and revel in the life that has brought me to this magical land that dazzles my eye and stills my soul.
Again, still.
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