Homecoming.
Wherever You Go, Here You Are: On Tending the Garden You Can't Escape
“What’s happened? What’s going on with you?”
Most people ask not because they care, but because they’re curious, for the nosy, judgmental, self-serving purpose of deciding where you stand with them now. Most do this unconsciously, so forgive them. Most of us are poor at relationships beyond simple exchange. “What’s in it for me?” sits at the base of every interaction.
I am going home.
Or rather, to what was home, now just the place my relatives live, where I came from. I just left the place that feels most like home, but somehow not quite mine, a place where I feel most alive, yet seeking something with the lofty aspiration to eventually return home to my Self.
What does that mean?
Here’s what I know: You can’t outrun your problems.
No matter how far or how fast you go, as soon as you rest, even briefly, there you are again. Right back in the middle of your beginning. The dust settles. The chaos quiets. And you realize you’ve been running from a garden you never learned to tend.
What else can you do but begin again?
“Starting over sounds terrible,” you say.
It is. It’s inconvenient, costly, exhausting. There’s no proof, no promise, no guarantee that where you’ll end up will be better than where you’ve been. Maybe you’re just moving to another square on the chessboard of life, where the same weeds will grow if you never learned to recognize them in the first place.
The problem isn’t the plot of land. It’s that you don’t know what belongs in your garden and what doesn’t.
So before you leave there to go there, you must come here. Home. To the ground zero of your identity.
WINTER: THE SEASON OF SELF-EXAMINATION
When they ask you, “What are you doing?” tell them you’re preparing your garden.
“But it’s the middle of winter.”
Exactly.
Winter is when gardeners do their most important work, not in the soil, but in the mind. You must study your future garden and learn discernment before spring arrives with its demands. What is a weed in your garden, and what is a seed to nurture?
This is the homecoming: returning to your patch of soil to decide, consciously and deliberately, what you will plant next.
But first, you must examine what’s already growing there.
Bring your heaviest, biggest baggage. Haul it back. Pull it out of the dusty recesses where you tried to hide it. Bring it all back to the training grounds that tried to break you, testing you with the burden of carrying these things.
Open the deep trunks one by one. Hold each item up to the light. Examine it closely.
Do you still see this in yourself? For yourself? Does this still serve you or who you want to be?
What it is and where it came from no longer matters. Ask only: “Do I still want this? Can I carry this into the future I want to create?”
You’d be amazed at how much you’re ready to release.
These are the weeds you’ve been carrying. Beliefs that once protected you but now strangle new growth. Stories about who you are that you inherited from people who didn’t know themselves. Ideas about what’s possible that were never yours to begin with.
Put them down. Use that pile of discarded noise as a stepping stone. See what you can see from this new vantage point.
Now look again at what remains. What gems appear from here?
These are your seeds, the authentic desires, the real values, the truths you’ve always known but were afraid to claim. Some you already carry. Some you’re just discovering. Some are still too heavy to hold.
How does it feel to carry the weight of something you already are? What about the weight of something you have the potential to become?
Can you grow into it? Or will you stay as you are, inevitably resolved to shrink back into the rubble of everything you claimed you were trying to leave behind?
May it inspire you to get stronger. To expand enough to bear it. To grow into the person who can wear it, and even outgrow it in time. To come back here, to shed what’s no longer true. To be brave enough to admit it and, once more, begin again.
THE DANGER OF AN UNTENDED GARDEN
We start growing old only when we stop pursuing the expression of a deeper, truer self.
We reach a level that’s accepted by our peers, “good enough” to belong, and we settle. Or worse, we get nowhere at all and concede, incorrectly, to our “fate” that a real life isn’t meant for people like us.
So we distract ourselves from these uncomfortable truths with modern indulgences and addictions. But they don’t help. You can never get enough of something that almost works.
Why? Because we never learned to distinguish weeds from seeds.
To the untrained eye, they look much the same. Some weeds are too easily mistaken for plants of purpose and meaning. These beautiful, deceptive weeds can overtake a garden before you notice their true nature.
The wind blows too many ideas into the garden of our mind. If we never examine them, never intentionally construct a mind of our own, we struggle to understand which battles are even ours to fight. We focus so much time and energy on borrowed concerns that we forget to tend the dreams of our own making.
“We all have to make sacrifices,” you might say.
Take that belief to your own ground zero. Hold it to the light. Decide exactly who benefits from it and whether it’s still something you want to carry as true. Is it a seed you planted, or a weed that blew in on someone else’s wind?
“It’s not that bad. I really have a lot to be grateful for,” you rehearse.
Maybe so. But if you let that idea pass instead of clinging to it like a life raft in a tsunami, you might find the courage to acknowledge that in this restless motion, you are, in fact, at the center of everything unexamined.
A haphazard garden recedes and yields to the dominant, hungry chaos of weeds until it’s nearly impossible to overthrow and regrow what’s intentional and personal. Not fully impossible, but very, very hard.
Much harder than if you take the time to mind the garden of your mind before spring arrives with its unexpected lessons.
THE ALTERNATIVE: BORROWED GARDENS
Or we wait to see what the gardens around us grow, planting only after ideas have blossomed elsewhere.
We chase the wind in the shallow, frenzied fashion of keeping up. The roots never take. We cannot be at peace with the art of another because it doesn’t reflect the art within.
This is why you can’t skip winter. This is why you can’t outrun the homecoming.
Wherever you go, here you are. You might as well make it a beautiful place to be; one you designed with intention, planted with your own hands, tended with discernment.
And that, my friend, is the perfect time for your homecoming. A chance to start over. Or at the very least, to begin again.
To yourself. To your roots. To the formative beginnings that shaped you. To the situations and stories you built around All That Happened, the ones you carry, whether you know it or not, into every action, every reaction, every relationship, every endeavor you think is so unique, so yours.
And yet, who really knows how to think for themselves?
Homeward, you must go. To the proverbial no-man’s-land. The ground zero of your identity.
Winter is the perfect time to envision the garden of your life. To dream. To plan. To design in your mind’s eye what is well with you. Better to set the vision now so you’re less distracted by the enticing bloom of what you never planted at all.
That is the homecoming.
Returning to your patch of soil. Deciding what to plant next.
Even if it’s only to be fully appreciated by you.
Come spring, I can’t wait to see what you’ve planted.
𓆸 Uprooting and learning to tend alongside you, SJT
- In dedication and in jousting memory of my Granddaddy, who tended a fabulous garden and was almost right about homecoming, afterall.
Hello human reading this - I am a NEW writer and I want to get better at writing. If you actually read this and made it to the end ANY FEEDBACK - no matter how blunt or hard- is genuinely and truly appreciated. THANK YOU. 🙏🏻