Craving Home 🏠

We didn’t take family vacations for eighteen years. We’d get away for a weekend now and again, but our commitments to CTL - both time-wise and financially - curtailed leisure activity. But who needs a vacation when the power of The Work and the soul-gifts we received through our leader’s wisdom were bestowed on us every day? 😉 Back in our CTL days, my husband and I didn’t even think about vacations. 

But, since leaving CLT in 2014, we've made a point of prioritizing them. We’ve learned how to relax as a family and as a couple, no longer tethered to a doctrine and the requirements that came along with it. We’ve developed a healthier work - life balance and we continue to learn how to have fun, welcoming more joy and a greater sense of ease into our lives. 

This summer highlighted a handful of quintessential destinations that afforded ample time with my daughter and grandson, my husband, good friends, and some essential time with my aging mother and beloved sister Judy. Although all of my travels included relaxation and heartfelt connections, there were a couple of stressors this summer as well. I traveled to Cape May, NJ before discovering that I brought a friendly little virus named Covid with me. This pervasive pest found its way into the respiratory system of my entire family and took a little wind out of our vacation sails ⛵️ 😏.

My summer travels culminated last night - when I laid awake in my hotel bed in Lake George, NY, grateful that my sister Judy was sleeping peacefully in the bed beside me. Her partner of 24 years is in a hospital bed at Vassar Brothers Hospital in Poughkeepsie. Fortunately, he’s stable and recovering but… jeepers… His emergency brought gravity into our annual-celebrating-sisterhood trip. 

While I tossed and turned, my mind kept pinging towards home. I was craving home. Enough travels, already. I want home and I want my work. I want my work rhythm 📅.

Today’s drive through the Adirondack Mountains and back home to Vermont was balm for this ache. Now at my desk, I glance out the window at the trees just starting to tinge yellow and I breathe deeply as I find my words. In this moment, words tumble and organize around the central role of home today and its poignant juxtaposition through the rise and fall of my cult coma*. 

When I snapped out of the cult-trance one decade ago - I was forced to unpack the emotional complexity of my erratic relationship to HOME. Eighteen years of The Work had not only sabotaged key family relationships but that it also devalued my relationship to the most important place in my life: Home. 🏠 During my four years of memoir writing, themes of home rose and fell in steady rhythm. Images and musings about home are woven into many if not all of the chapters of An Everyday Cult.

And here I am today, teasing out the tendrils of thought around home - in the same way that I swoon for writing itself.

Writing orients me, organizes me and helps me to integrate life’s complexities.

Home orients me, organizes me and helps me to integrate my travels - both worldly and internal.

*”Cult Coma" is one of Esther Friedman’s brilliant terms. Do you know what it feels like to be in a cult coma?!? I do.