I woke up this morning in a cabin to the view of the sunrise gilding the horizon over Lake Atitlan. From the bed in my humble cabin’s loft, I watched the volcano Fuego puff a plume of picturesque smoke that expanded and snaked across the sunrise. Birds resumed the songs they sang the day before. Surrounding me, peaking out from the cane grass came the bobbing heads of a hundred singing sunflowers.

I’m home, the scene seemed to say. Home—a word that surpasses our mind and moves straight to the heart.

A Wandering, Wondering Home

Home, what a word for a nomad to wonder about. Home to me are those moments outside the plotting struggles we constantly confront just to meet our needs. Home is waking up and not needing to be anywhere and do anything, which frees you to do the everything your heart needs. Which, if everyone found themselves able to always do, would end up being all that our world needs.

The previous 3 months I was on a fundraising tour across America, traveling across 4 states, 7 cities, for 26 events to raise what’s needed for students of the Integral Heart Family. It was an ongoing stream of activities and concerted thought and effort—continually uprooting and re-grounding. Home on the road is a cup of predictable morning tea and poetry, a mantra, an intention to try my best, time on my mat, a breath of fresh air, a smile at the rambling reality I found myself in. This was a journey, but it was also a destination. I could see the last 15 years of my life conspiring to create it.

I am an ongoing contradiction of conflicting desires. One part of me seeks the destination while the other embarks on the journey. Where did my heart ever learn to be such a dancing vagabond? How did it know that this body would need to cross a million mountains before it would ever tolerate rest?

Julien Baker sings, “I am never anywhere, anywhere I go. When I’m home, I’m never there long enough to know.”

I so relate to that. Much of my last decade has been spent wandering, rambling, seeking. Sometimes the people closest to me, my family, old friends, and hometown have felt like familiar foreigners. We love each other, but my worldview has been uniquely formed and strangely spiced—at times it seemed like a canyon separating cliffs of the same stone.

From this side of my eyes, my journeying has never seemed aimless, but crucial. Ostensibly it has always been about, learning, writing and philanthropy—but maybe these are a symptom of an even deeper drive.

I have always found my deepest center of self in the striving, the seeking, the longing, the missing, the heart in motion to new heights of emotion. The world is an unceasing mess of uncertainty, but the humblest things in you are always known. This is a feeling not so easy to relate. It feels like the twilight whispering directions to the stars.

My whole life seems pointed towards tomorrow, while searching for peace today. And now it’s led me here, to Lake Atitlan, to a cabin I can stage my life from. That life won’t last forever anymore than my present surroundings will. And when that thought ceases to be terrifying, it becomes empowering and enabling—it paints a coat of grace and gratitude upon every instance and makes every moment a song that sings, “rejoice.”

***

Hey there friend! Thank you for stopping by my blog. You can support me and my writing my checking out my latest book “All the Beloved Known Things“

Or check out my book of non-fiction travel adventures, “The Nomad’s Nomad“

IG: @LukeSpartacus