Home is an important word for me– an important concept, an important place. Ever since I was young, I’ve relished the opportunity to create a home and decorate it just so. For me, that has included magazine collaged furniture, multi-colored painted walls, rainbow throw rugs, glass animals, heart-shaped stones, candles, endless rows of books (some read, some still waiting), necklaces and earrings from my travels, scarves from Costa Rica, India, Italy, Mexico, and South Africa, a tapestry from Nepal, an arsenal of essential oils, a blanket with llamas, a handwoven rug from Oaxaca, a yoga mat, photos, and a hammer and nails, because if that wasn’t enough already, I also love to hang things on walls.
When I travel, I can downsize my life to a large backpack, wear the same pants for days without question, live in sandals or hiking boots, and get by just fine. And yet, as soon as I have the chance to nest, as I’m experiencing right now while moving into a room in the house of two friends in Tucson, it’s like I’m a mama hen, snuggling my tail feathers into the golden hay of my roost. Today, I painted bookshelves, turquoise blue with golden corn (represent the Midwesterner in me, and the one in me who honors corn as one of the Three Sisters of indigenous nations). I have been staring at my collection of markers and paints, sketch pads and Ayurvedic medicines, poetry books and sun hats, long skirts and patterned bags, and I’m feeling quite overwhelmed with it all.
Is this the same me that lived in that tiny house in Ecuador two years ago, a house converted from a chicken coop beneath the carport?
Moving, be it from Chicago to Kansas City or Varanasi, India back to Tucson, demands some slow, swirling respect. There’s the simultaneous joy at the prospect of nestling as well as the impending sense of disequilibrium. Today, it’s manifesting in things, the gathering of objects. I don’t need these– the yak wool shawl in Arizona, the glass unicorn, the peppermint spray. I already purged lots of it last week and yet, I still feel bloated with the weight of stuff. Noted, my stuff all still fits in one room, in a jammed car if you don’t count the bed or a chair, yet still, it’s heavy. The capitalistic promise of happiness. The fulfillment of needs. When I think of needs, I cannot help but think of those deeply needing more than what I, or any singular person, can give.
In Nonviolent Communication, NVC, the workshops I’ve been attending, we talk a lot about universal needs. The basic concept is that whenever emotions arise, it is the result of needs not being met or being met. The primary needs are what we often learn as Maslow’s hierarchy: air, water, shelter, health, food. I would add love. This foundation is not so steady for many in the United States, and I think that’s one of the things that goes through my mind right now. After returning here from elsewhere, it never ceases to amaze me how many people don’t have their basic needs met here, in a country that many people in other places dream of visiting.
In Tucson, there are dozens of people experiencing homelessness right now—they are here for the sun or for the kindness or for the gem show that brings thousands of tourists every year. A German friend of mine remarked that was the first thing he noticed in the States; not the highways, or the cleanliness, or the tall buildings, but the homelessness and the apparent ambivalence of passersby. With the environment, the EPA is sliced into smaller pieces, and nurturing the most important resource, water, is a terrifying reality in this desert state. Yet environmental is only one aspect compared with the internal landscape. Many folks living in poverty, which overwhelming includes people of color, don’t have access to any form of health care. NPR this morning reported that 50% of Americans don’t have access to a health care facility. Health is a universal human need, and I believe the responsibility of a government. Period.
For me, the main reason I can qualify for Medicaid is because I’ve been making a salary that is enough to live in other countries, but not nearly enough to survive here. To be honest, I imagine it is become of my race as well. I come back to this temporal flow of jobs, and am grateful that I qualify, but so aware of so many people who can’t. You have to be making next to nothing, less than $20,000 a year it seems, to be supported by what’s left of the Affordable Care Act.
Mental healthcare is supposedly included, and so when I went to have my first appointment to meet with a counselor last spring, I expected a higher level of attentiveness. The waiting room was packed with people with needs. I sat for five hours in the waiting room and watched so many people asking at the counter for help, requesting their meds to be changed, asking for a sooner appointment. I learned you cannot change your medicine without an appointment, but with appointments every 3-4 months, imagine what happens to people who cannot afford to talk to another psychiatrist. They wait, sometimes struggling with meds that are wreaking havoc on their systems. Without these needs being met, there isn’t even the time or space to begin thinking about cultivating a cozy home, owning belongings, achieving a sense of harmony and creativity that come with a room to yourself.
I think, in reflecting on this theme of home and needs today, it felt insincere to write about belonging, the need I’m feeling the most right now, without acknowledging these other foundational needs. It’s not so much to guilt trip myself into acknowledging privilege, but to remind myself of perspective. That doesn’t mean that I can’t enjoy the small mementos that I’ve gathered. They are fairly anti-capitalist in that I’ll hold onto a glass pig from my Grandma but won’t need any new gadgets for years. There is such a scope of needs and desires.
When I think of belonging, I think externally, socially, and internally. The external fixations might be the house, the room, the city, as well as a society and system that supports, protects, and sees me. Socially, I think of friends, intimacy, love, and care, the heart spaces that want to be held. Internally, I continue to remember I belong to myself. I belong to myself. I have to state it twice, because sometimes I forget. It’s easy, in a patriarchy, to forget that I have agency, the power to fulfill my body, my thoughts, my pleasure, my needs, my wants, all on my own, and that remembering is powerful.
Power to me feels like tingles. It feels like pushups and blood pumping. I feel myself present in present in the tips of my fingers, typing on these keys, and in my stomach, feeling round and huggable right now, and in my ears, burning with the singing of neighborhood birds. My power is in my belonging, to me, to this world, as I am right now. It is a remembering, as well, that I have always been here, not waiting dormant, but already being.
I’m learning, in this process of nestling into home, that waking up to myself is a lifelong practice, something that will happen again and again. Exasperation does not serve as long as my foundational needs are met. From this place, I can rise, and in the rising, I can perhaps be there for others to rise as well. Right now calls for celebration of that, so I will do as I do with a room: open the windows, let in the sunshine, light a candle, curl up in a corner, rock the chair, read the book, write the words, and let my shoulders sigh down. Right now, I have everything I need.
