Home isn't always a place we can go back to
why I haven't been writing about plants much, the heart ecosystem and the home of our memories
I’ve been re-thinking home, after many years of longing for ‘home’ and belonging.
Some say, home is where the heart is. It’s curious then when the heart becomes so big as to weave so many ‘homes’ in that, to be sitting in place, means that there will always be a missing, of a home somewhere, somehow. My heart is in lots of people and places and things, and its impossible to say which of those wins them all, to keep me put. Ironically, I long for most the homes I don’t get to go to anymore, my grandparent’s farm, my ex-partner whose body and heart felt like a safe hearth full of seeds and laughter, my herb garden of 10 years now bulldozed into a ditch, with some of the plants still surviving down there, or from cuttings in my sister’s garden I never get to visit.
Maybe I need to get comfortable already with the reality that I’ll always feel this tension, this pull towards another place or thing, people or community, that perhaps if I intentionally choose and give that person or place a chance, it will actually be home. Or that, home will always look more like an accordion stretched across time and space, place and bodies. And to sit still in one part of ‘homeness’ is to always leave another, and the missing and longing is an experience of being human, who is woven and connected in the ecosystems of our bonds.
In my darkest moments, wailing and crying, and feeling destitude, I say to myself, “I just want to go home.” But where?
Where does my heart go in my mind’s eye, in the missing, in the embodied tension of my grief?
It goes to past times of feeling belonging. Of feeling accepted and loved. Of enjoying the smell of the air after a rain on the porch I saw day after day, year after year that it became literally the map of everything real. The smell of rain on my grandparents’ porch, is home. The smell of an ex-lover’s clothing, the texture of a spoon they carved, and seeds I plant that are related to the ones we carried on our backs for hundreds of miles through wilderness, is home. When I wail for home, I wait for these places in time that are no longer. My grandparents’ farm is being sold, and I will not be able to go sit on that porch anymore. My ex keeps sending items back to me through other people, items I gave them out of love and seeing them, as if to not be burdened by having been loved and knowing someone loves them in a far away place, as if to say— I am not your home, don’t come back home. Or these objects are more a burden of pain than helping anything. So be it. So I don’t go home, and I long for it in the precious ability of my imagination and memory, where it is as safe as I alone allow. When home is only the memories you have and nothing else. Perhaps when we have felt we have home, at some point in time, even for a glimpse, even for a momentary safe settling of our bones downward, we may never have it again.
I consider all of the people being displaced in Palestine right now, homes destroyed and not just physical homes but the home in trees, cats, wind and kin. Smell of air, the routines of neighbors, of birds in the morning. And yet, Jewish folks of the diaspora have longed for home, after the land was salted and assaulted, the story of coming back, and perhaps hoping there finally is one, means displacing another from theirs.
Do we in our want for home, actually do harm? I consider the settling of Turtle Island predominantly by marginalized populations in Europe, where they were not wanted for some reason or another, displacing indigenous peoples, with a violent entitlement to find home, peace, and belonging. A place to be, and plant a tree, tend to dirt or have children. To hear the same land body day in and day out. The body of place, as if it is a person, is what so many of us long for.
I haven’t been able to research or write about plants for awhile in the way I used to, in the way I made my entire life for most of my 20’s and early 30’s because it as a home, the work, reminds me of homes that are no longer.
When teaching ecology classes last summer, while it was amazing for me to share in the unique way I do, bringing so many bits together to teach about place - it was still extremely emotionally difficult for me, because it reminded me of the home I cannot go back to. It reminds me of the unfinished writings, of the void I cannot fill. I can’t laugh the way I used to at the jokes of someone who was my best friend, who I could dive into the sacredness of this work with. I don’t laugh like that anymore. I don’t touch like that anymore. I overwhelm and stress people out when trying to talk about ecology and plants and ethnobotany and ideas a lot of the time.
Home is the plants, as they will never betray you, and yet, they still bring me to my knees in sorrow, in missing. I have put aside what I used to do in order to try to heal, but I do miss that life and how inspired I was, and how hopeful I was when feeling supported in collaboration. I’ve had to pivot, and not research, or even take many new botanical photos, because the vision was lost when my collaborator was lost. The depth of this will be for a private post at some point, where I feel safer to explain to folks subscribed why I have been taking space from writing specifically about plants, or sharing as much about them in the way I do when teaching in person. There’s a few reasons, and some of them involve the missing of home that is unbearable at times, that I have to do other things with myself in order to get through it. I’m not going home for Christmas this year either in part because I can’t handle not getting to go to that porch, and knowing in my body that it is being sold for $ so someone else can make it their home, and I won’t be allowed there.
Money can never replace home.
Some homes can never truly be replaced.
Bodies of humans we find home in, can never be replaced.
No matter how much I write about, or wail about the missing of homes I cannot go back to, it will never bring them back. Becoming comfortable with the longing, like I said before, is something I, and all of us, must accept.
I know many of my readers, podcast audience and students would love more plant musings from me. This is what I’m known for. This is what I ‘know’ to share. This is what I traveled for, what I stayed in-between for, what I started all this for: to learn and to explore and to share what I could of land-based connection and lifeways.
Writing specifically about specific plants and their web of kin and how they are seen is something I’ll eventually do again.
But know that the terrain of it, in the way it once resembled a home, is no longer, and is a place I long for, and will take time for me to get back to in a different way, a new way. It will never be the same home, but maybe I’ll find home again. I can’t see it right now, and often we don’t see it coming.
A few notes I want to share in this newsletter before I move on to the next texture of my day, of finding home in anything I can. A short walk on frozen ground, Sagebrush seeds and Greasewood bones. An herbal tea to make for my healing infected thumb. A podcast convo to finish via ZOOM. A lock to fix with a locksmith. Stew to eat. Hide to wring out. Home is somewhere in there.
I recently lowered subscription prices for paid subscribers across the board - to make it more accessible to become a paid subscriber to private publications and podcast episodes on here. Perhaps if I do get my plant research voice back, your paid subscriptions would encourage me. Plus, it takes time, money and resources to do it all.
Monthly subscriptions are now $7 / month
Yearly at $70 / year
Founder’s at $150 / year (or any price you choose)
The Ground Shots Herbs apothecary will be open until the 31st. After that, seasonal medicine offerings won’t be live again until sometime in the Spring. And FYI, there are still a couple Tallow Balms left, an old favorite, made with herbal infused oils and hand rendered local tallow. Desert Wound Salve and Chaparral body oil are currently on sale until Christmas.
Hides I’ve been tanning to share and land-based craft offer ups will get posted on January 13. Stay tuned for some sharing of what these offers will be- I hardly ever sell any of my tanned hides or handmade things - except for buttons - and I’ve been tanning since 2013. Is that 10 years without selling one hide except for a few scraps to bookbinders? Yep. I definitely took my time before doing anything to monetize most of the crafts I do - weaving, sewing, hide tanning, natural dyes. My intention in learning has always been about the land connection first for my reasons to learn and understand.
Some winter and spring, and general 2023 class offerings I will announce soon but right now I’m in the quiet winter ethers of not extending for a moment.
Book club ideas are coming! I know many of you are on the thread for that and are waiting for action there. I’m also sitting with how to schedule it, and my want to go deep with people into ideas and stories so wanting to figure out how to do it in a cool way.
Two new Ground Shots Podcast episodes are coming - one featuring Ethan Bonnin on the Biology of the Borderlands— and one with Jason Hone on the ethnobotany of biblical times. woo hoo! Since the podcast doesn’t pay me (and never has), support by donation at kelly-moody-6 on venmo, substack publication subscriptions and buying books through my bookshop account are ways to support the existence of the project and my time and attention doing it and potentially help make it a sustainable focused endeavor in the future. We’re at 80 episodes and by 100 I hope to have it be a financially and energetically sustainable project.
Home. The more you say it, the deep it goes. Aum. It was fairly shocking to read this, resonate with it, then have you repeat the essence of the sentiment evoked, that I have felt many times. Such as right now, packed in a sea of humans on a bus in India. The feeling of diffusion when Our Hearts are spread over time and space.
I guess this IS home.
Mahalo for the medicine.
Thank you for your courage and your honesty. One of the things I value about your writing and teaching is that you are you, and you offer what you know from a place of vulnerability (as well as tremendously rich knowledge). You never try to be someone else or minimize what you feel and the pain you carry. I honor that deeply. Home is so difficult for many of us, and you speak to that with such truth. I feel fortunate that after years of wandering, I have made myself a home here in the high desert of northern New Mexico, and it feels nourishing and right. Which is not to say I don't wish for love and companionship too, but I have friends and community, human and wild, and I am sustained and nurtured. My heart will always yearn for the landscapes of northwest Wyoming, the home of my spirit, but I can't live with the human culture there. So I live here where the southern Great Plains bend upwards to meet the Rocky Mountains, where blue grama grows with galena grass and sand sage, and where the coyotes sing me to sleep and sage thrashers bathe in my bird bath. My heart is full.