Hi. I’m Katie. This newsletter is a place where I explore my spirituality and my humanity in an intersectional way. Here’s what I’m thinking about this week…
Sometimes, when I cannot sleep, I wander the halls of my childhood home in my mind.
It’s funny how, all these years later, I can still feel the rough grain of the wooden bannister to the basement, one that my parents took from an old, crumbling church. I can mentally open the narrow door to the laundry chute, which I slid down on a dare when I was ten. I can twirl the lazy Susan in the kitchen and watch the collection of dried goods blend into a smeared rainbow of color.
All I have to do is close my eyes, and I am back there. Home. A word that feels untouchable these days.
Sometimes, I visit other places that I have labeled home.
The apartment that bumped up against a cemetery in St. Louis that I shared in the first few blissful years with my ex husband, with its beige carpet and crooked bird feeder out back. The suburban home we later bought together, the one that felt like it was always holding its breath for fear of letting out all of the secrets encoded in its walls. And, more recently, the creaky floored apartment I spent two, post-divorce years in, the one with old chalk drawings on the basement walls and jewel-toned stained glass windows.
In moments of stillness—the end of a yoga class, the last few deep breaths before I drift off to sleep—I allow myself to hurtle across time and space, to step nimbly over oceans and years, and to stand, once more, on the threshold of the places that used to hold me so easily and for so long.
I let myself ease into the palm of their collective hands, to soften into the embrace of a place where the key always slides smoothly into the door.
It hurts to open my eyes again. To realize that home is a four-letter word, one that sticks in my throat and refuses to come out.
It is Tuesday.
My friend Beth sends me a text message. I see it around noon, but I save it to read later. I know I will need it.
The thing you have to know about Beth is that she is beautiful. Externally, yes, with her pre-raphaelite red hair and smooth skin. But most of all, she is beautiful in the way that a sun-dappled tree in the center of a still forest is beautiful: sure, steady, and a form of shelter in times of need.
Her message is a link to a poem, one that ends up being exactly the shelter I need. I read it while sitting in the car, exhausted after a long day at a new job that I am not sure if I like yet.
I listen to a man with a Scottish accent read the poem, which is called “Leaving the Island.” I lean the seat back just a bit, close my eyes, and let the words make shapes in my mind.
I cry as the man reads the last stanza, his voice crescendoing like the undulating waves that I know are beating out the same pace as always just over the hill near where I sit.
Above all, the way afterwards, you thought you had left the island but hadn't, the way you knew you had gone somewhere into the shimmering light and come out again on the tide as you knew you had to, as someone who would return and live in the world again, a man granted just a glimpse, a woman granted just a glimpse, some one half a shade braver, a standing silhouette in the stern, holding the rail, riding the long waves back, ready for the exile we call a home.
I slide the key into the ignition of a car that does not belong to me, and I drive over that hill.
Below me, the waves glitter and glisten in the late afternoon sun. I find it impossible to believe that anything exists beyond this shimmering expanse. Impossible to believe that I once existed beyond here.
Above me, the mountains rise, gatekeepers or protectors who fold me into their foreboding energy, absorbing me and rending me of any last vestiges of the woman I left behind when I chose to recuse myself from what I have always known.
The island holds me in the palm of her hand, and I twist and turn--the exiled one who chose to leave. I writhe and weep and grasp hopelessly towards a word that I cannot yet claim.
Home.
In a few days, it will be Thanksgiving. A holiday that relies on home.
Last year, I ate rolls and turkey and cranberry sauce straight from the can in South Carolina with my family. I walked across trails scattered with orange-brown pine needles with my parents and made sloppy gingerbread houses with my nieces.
I cried on the plane ride back to St. Louis because home felt like something I was fated to just brush my fingers against for the briefest of moments. I felt like it was something reserved for manufactured holidays, pumped full of amplified emotions.
This year, I will be on the island.
I won’t watch my father stand over the stove for hours, tasting and testing his gravy recipe until it meets his high standards. I won’t taste my mother’s pecan pie or watch terrible Hallmark movies with my sister or draw pictures for my youngest niece.
Instead, I will bake a carrot cake. I will drive across the island and share it with other people who are also in the process of defining the word home for themselves. I will think about my family and feel sad and then think about the beauty here and feel happy.
I don’t know for sure, but I think I will catch a glimpse of that woman who is half a shade braver for having left home again. In search of herself, yes, but in search of the sort of home that floats in the air in rooms where people gather together and share parts of themselves with the whole.
In a few days, I will close my eyes once more and go home. I will pass through the shimmering light and run my fingers across all of the versions of me that have been my home at one point in my journey.
And I will arrive, finally, here—face to face with the woman who stands in the center of an island, a place not yet her home but a place that she will someday look back at with a sense of yearning.
The exile that I will someday call a home.
Thanksgiving is a holiday that I have mixed feelings about (see: colonialism), but in the sense that it is about gratitude and community, I hope that yours is filled with both of those things. And if you, too, are contemplating all the homes that you have willingly left during this holiday season, I’d like to hear about them.
Cards for Humanity: The Four of Wands
When I first started reading tarot, the Four of Wands was described to me a linking to “any moment where it would be appropriate to serve a cake.” Graduations, parties, weddings…you get the idea.
I still sometimes read this minor arcana card with that lens, but lately, I’ve been thinking more about the journey involved in the Four of Wands. It’s almost as if we are viewing the scene from a distance, from a remote place that is difficult to access. After all, the bountiful garland of flowers is situated in the middle of a desert, away from the city in the background.
Regardless of the hard-to-access location, the two figures have chosen to leave their home and dance jubilantly towards this altar of abundance and fertility. They know that, in the journey, they will be faced with moments of parched-lip thirst where their emotional landscape dries up, leaving them in need of replenishment and restoration. But they choose exile anyway. It’s almost as if they must do so.
At times, life urges us to exile ourselves so that we can crack open a new portal within ourselves and begin to access a version of ourselves that simply could not exist within the staid city walls we have spent our time in. And this doesn’t just happen once, when we leave our childhood homes and set out on our own paths. The universe uproots us, time and time again, so that we can continue to grow and to seek that flowered altar in the distant desert, or the promise of beauty when we choose to enter into uncharted territories.
When we really think about it, the two figures in the Four of Wands can’t possibly see all of the detailed, lush beauty of the altar they seek. But they believe that it is there, and in the exile, they are spurred forward by trust: trust that the universe will bring them to the threshold of a new home, one that is internal and external.
When the Four of Wands appears in a reading, interrogate where you are being asked to trust enough to journey towards something impossibly beautiful, even if you cannot quite see all of it yet. Where is the idea of home shifting for you, and what transitory deserts must you walk through to arrive once more at a place of belonging?
The movement doesn’t have to be one of heavy sorrow. It is possible to feel sadness in the leaving but joy in the going. The Four of Wands reminds us to be, as the poem “Leaving the Island” says, half a shade braver and to pass through the shimmering light once more in search of a new self.
I hope you have a restful holiday that feels like a version of all of the places you have called home…most of all, the one that exists within you.