Home

At last

I was sitting by the fire with my teacher from my three-year school on Celtic spirituality, called rebirth in Welsh, Dadeni. "Would you like to talk?" she asked. Everyone had left for an all-night vigil, which I'd decided not to attend because I was recovering from illness. She could barely finish the sentence before tears were streaming down my cheeks. I told her what was present, and after some discussion, she carefully said,

"I experience you as an orphan, trying really hard to be an adult."

No one had ever put it in words like that, but it felt so true, so familiar, so painful. It's odd to recognise yourself as orphaned when your parents and siblings are alive.

At the last Dadeni retreat, we were studying the Second Branch of the Mabinogion, a Welsh myth. In it, Bendigeidfran, the giant king, is so vast that no building can contain him. When the Irish invite him to a feast, he must wade across the sea because no ship is large enough to carry him. Later, unable to enter any house, he is left standing outside, looking on from across the river. In an attempt to honour him, the Irish nobles propose a rare gesture: "Never before has he been contained in a house. Make a house in his honour, and from the honour of making the house, something he has never had: a house that can contain him, he will make peace with you."

“Like him, I had wandered for years, too big in my own restlessness to be contained, unsure if there was a place that could hold me without asking me to shrink.”

That image of a giant finally being offered a home touched something deep in me: a longing that had been quietly humming for years but now felt urgent. My body yearned for a place to rest, and my nervous system ached for a place to feel safe. For the past two years, I'd dotted around a friend's Home to recover from Colombia. …then I moved into my partner’s place, a Pembrokeshire retreat centre where he was working. Whilst I was appreciative of those homes, I was in someone else's home and the longing to root was growing stronger.

In the run up to Christmas, I brought up the conversation with my partner about where we wanted to live long term, and we both felt that where we were wasn’t the place for us. On New Year's Eve, we went up North to his homeland of Northumberland, holding the question "is it here we want to root?". On New Year’s Eve, visiting his homeland in Northumberland, we met some family friends just after midnight. When we mentioned moving, they said, “We’re looking for house-sitters for a couple of months.” The timing matched perfectly, exactly when we’d be ready to leave.

By the time we drove back to Wales, we had a place to live, and my partner had applied for a job and been invited to a job interview. On a snowy, white-coated January departure, a white barn owl sent us off, and that was that: the decision to move and living up north was made. Everything had fallen into place. It was barely a few weeks in when my partner's mum mentioned that there was a beautiful house available to rent on the town square that had been in the process of being let out, but the tenants had fallen through. We were given first dibs, and after seeing the photos, we agreed to take it before even seeing it in person.

A couple of weeks after moving, in therapy, I admitted feeling anxious about being in my partner’s community, with his family and childhood friends.

“What are you afraid of?” my therapist asked.

“That I’ll mess it up. That I’ll say something wrong.”

She asked again, “What are you really afraid of?”

I paused.

“If I had to dream of a place to settle, to start a family, to be among the kind of people I’d want to be with… it would probably look a lot like this.”

“And why is that scary?”

“Because it feels like I don’t deserve it.”

One quiet Sunday morning, six weeks in, my partner and I were curled on the sofa, music playing. I remarked my favourite playlist was full of songs about Home. “Now we have a Home, you can find songs about finding Home,” he said. And suddenly, I felt it, the presence, the peace, the love. Tears streamed down my face. This wasn’t just weeks in the making. It was years of taking down walls to trust people. Years of opening my heart to love. Years of letting myself be welcomed. Somewhere deep inside, the orphan I’d been carrying for so long curled up on that sofa and knew she had finally found her way Home.

With love and magic,

Authentic Alex

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In the meantime see you next Wednesday x

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