place, forever welcoming us home

It has been twelve years since I swapped coasts. An unfair trade of fiery sunsets that gracefully dissolve into the Indian Ocean, for lush rainforests + whip birds + stormy summer evenings.

One should never have to give one up one of these things for the other.

I’ve been thinking lately about how we make a place our home. I’ve travelled to so many incredible places in my life, but only a few could I call home.

For a short window of time, I’m back in the west. The smell of this coast is so familiar. The flowering Peppermints, the coastal heath, and Banksia are perfumes like no other. I’m not sure any description I could give would do it justice. But when I inhale, it is like a drug.

It is like coming home.

I return to Yallingup beach, where I spent much of my twenties running. My feet dig into the soft sand and curiously, it is as if my leg muscles r e m e m b e r. My legs want to break into a gallop. But I stop myself.

Because I am not that person anymore. And I don’t want to run.

A place, if we leave it for long enough, will show us the person we once were… and it also shows us who we have become.

I think about her - that version of me. Running her little heart out at the beach each morning. Charged up on a hard + fast diet of not-enough, ashtanga, chardonnay + bad decisions. Always trying to outrun the shitshow. Always fucking running.

I wish I could tell her that she would work it out in the end.

Everything here is as familiar as the freckles on my face. The omnipresent wind + aridity. The lingo. The surf breaks. The way the scent of the wildflowers, in just the right wind direction, punches you in the face. Roos big enough write-off your car. The way the coarse sand sticks to your legs so dedicatedly, that you have to scrub it off with your fingernails. Sunsets, which for a few minutes each day, set the whole world on fire. So many faces here that I cherish. So much that I left behind.

When I left this place all those years ago, I was under the impression that I had to choose. There, or here. I believed that in order to create a new home, you had to abandon the old one.

No one told me I could have, or would have, both.

Perhaps this is also true when we have more than one child. We wonder how the hell will we love this one to the same degree as we loved the first? But soon enough, we learn that we never have to divvy up our heart.

Because the heart knows, very well, how to  e x p a n d.

We can leave a place, but we never disconnect from it. It continues to live on IN us, as a parent, friend + guide. The keeper of our stories and birthplace of our memories.

Forever welcoming us home.

 ❤️