My Heart’s Home

One of the fascinating pieces of Irish Celtic Lore to me is the concept of thin places, where this world and the next seem to mysteriously collide. I’ve witnessed this collision in tender moments and quiet  fields where I felt most authentic, alive, and connected to my creator and fellow creation—where heaven and earth seem to touch.

Thin places are theorized to be controlled by supernatural forces. I think they really are born out of love. The pure, honest kind. As such, I’m convinced that soulmates are the equivalent of thin places. Buddhist tradition says that we get several soulmates in our life who teach us what we need to know at each point in our journey. I think that we only get one, and even if we love others, it is never quite the same as that special person. By some miracle I found mine early in life. Keith. By an even greater act of God, he felt the same way about me, and asked me to marry him, and we entered into that covenant with the Divine.
We both knew what we had was profoundly unique and special. As the song goes, we marched to the beat of a different drummer, but luckily we heard the same one.
Before meeting him I was restless, and since his death, I’ve been lost. One of the things that grief has taught me was that he was not only my true love, he was my home.
When he first passed away I didn’t know if I could handle sleeping in our bedroom. I had woken up to my own personal hell the night his cardiac arrest occurred. I also couldn’t afford the rent on my own, and so I felt like I had to move. I wound up moving several more times over the past few months, with the most recent and hopefully more permanent move being a little more than a week ago.

    I love the house I just moved into. The quietness of the rural area, an area we had both been interested in living in one day, evidenced by a crumpled sheet of our future home plans still tucked away in my orange binder.
I love the remoteness of it and the way you can almost hear the wind if you listen long enough. I can envision him walking to his truck in the morning with dogs trailing behind, turning around to grin and whistle at me, and maybe comment on the tracks left by a nighttime wild visitor. I know this peaceful setting will help with my healing and my pursuit of both God and my dream of being a writer. 

   As I’ve been buying supplies I needed for the new house, I’ve come across a myriad of decor items that refer to “home” with affectionate terms. 

I’ve found each one jarring and shied away from them. As perfect as this old farmhouse is, no building could ever truly be home for me.

    When Keith and I got together our lives were chaotic. We spent a lot of time in sketchy motels, fields, and in our trucks due to long hours with the dog kennel. I have mastered the art of sleeping in the passenger seat of a pickup truck. Keith was convinced I’m part monkey and said I could lean back and twist around and grab onto something with my toes and fall asleep.

   The home we lived in wasn’t much. A single wide we were renting he had used during his bachelorhood. When I moved in I had to push mice out and ask the dogs to make a space for me.  But we were so happy and it became our castle. We both wanted better and yet we both knew all we needed was each other. I can still see his face looking into my eyes in a romantic moment when he told me he finally felt home with me. I was what he had been searching for all his life. And even though I got to experience him in the earlier part of my life I knew he was my home. My souls true partner.

   I’m learning that change is the main thing I can rely on, but that that’s okay, even if I hate the idea of the unknown. I revisit the biblical story of manna and am reminded stockpiling and planning out everything is not reliable. Nothing is. But love is. And as someone much wiser than me said, “love is not a scarce commodity we need to ration in case we run out. Friendship with the source of love guarantees we will have sufficient supply.”

At the end of the day everything on earth is temporary and the beauty is that my home is eternal. 

And Keith will be waiting. Grinning.