The Road Home: Discovering Belonging In My Search For Place

The Road Home:
Discovering belonging in my search for place
by Lisa G.P. Miller

Shakespeare’s famous play begins “Two households, both alike…”, an age-old story of young lovers and their tragic demise. But unlike those star-crossed lovers, my husband and I were destiny’s darlings, brought together quickly and powerfully as we embarked on creating a life together. And as we said yes to each other and all of life’s possibilities, I said yes to living in two homes that had been my husband’s life before me - one in the desert in Arizona and one by the ocean in California. And we were blissfully at home in our two households.

Until then, I had spent the majority of my adult life creating a home in the Western United States. After growing up in the East, I left my parent’s home in Pittsburgh for college in New York. Upon graduation, I set out for a new life in Taos, New Mexico and later moved to Scottsdale, Arizona, where I built a business and bought my first home.

However, in all the moving and sinking down of roots through my twenties and thirties, I discovered the profound truth that Maya Angelou so beautifully describes:  “The ache for home lives in all of us, the safe place where we can go as we are and not be questioned.” For me, home is in the deepest sense a place of quiet and stillness, both physical and spiritual, where the heart finds rest.

My husband, John, and I have two of those places! And it is divine. Our home in the desert is an old adobe nestled amongst towering trees and old growth cactus. It is patrolled by hawks and populated by wild rabbits, quail, coyotes and a bobcat. Just being there, the hectic world outside gives way to reflection and contemplation. We have a cook’s kitchen and five beehive fireplaces where from the logs of our mesquite forest John lights fires with the verve that other people light candles. When you are there, you want to stay there.

Our home on the coast is a cozy beach cottage with endless views of the Pacific. The place is white and bright, and at night the scent of the salt-air drifts in the windows and a foghorn lulls us to sleep. By day, we live not by clocks but by the sun. We swim far out in the ocean with the dolphins. We feast from the seasonal bounty of California’s earth and sea.

Our two homes are both sanctuaries, but are 400-some miles apart. So the fundamental mechanics of travel presented difficulties. We built art studios in both places so that I could work seamlessly as we moved, and we have carried many things back and forth while driving across state lines. But sometimes, I would be reaching for a favorite paint brush while in California and realize it was in Arizona. Or I’d get frustrated looking for that particular Joan Mitchell book that I wanted for inspiration and couldn't put my hands on. Maintaining a small business selling art also creates logistical problems when the inventory is split between two locations so far apart. I began shopping in duplicate not only for art materials, but items like jeans and toothpaste, buying everything ‘two by two’, as if I was Noah preparing the Ark.

Even so, the reality is you can’t be two places at once. The movement between homes became unsettling. I began to feel if there were shifting sands beneath my feet, and an uneasiness grew in me. I started to question myself: Where do I feel at home? Where am I more creative? Where do I belong? I lost my perspective and instead of having two homes, I felt like we had none. It was an illusion, but nonetheless perplexing.

What to do? When in doubt, consult Rumi, who told me: “Each day we wake up empty and frightened. Don’t go into the library and read. Take down your instrument and play. Let the beauty we love be what we do. There are thousands of ways to kneel and kiss the earth.”

So in the spirit of the Persian poet, John and I set out on a pilgrimage to kiss the California coastline. We decided to start just North of San Francisco and explore by car, driving as far as we desired to go. We had blankets and picnic baskets and a desire for high adventure. I brought painting supplies and sketchbooks; he brought a classic Hasselblad camera. For two weeks, we traveled slowly and deliberately to take it all in. It transformed us as we followed the contours of the land at the edge of the ocean.

We had wonder and time. Beauty led us on. As Joan Didion writes in her memoir of a similar trip with her husband John, “We went wherever the day took us.” As we drove along, sunlight and lifting fog revealed the path ahead. Wondrous things captured our attention. Small towns like Elk with only a general store had an unconventional charm. At the Sea Ranch, a family of deer grazed in the grass, staring at us silently from their home outside our window. We watched each other for hours as we settled into our home for the night. On the Mendocino Coast, we were captivated by two sea lions sleeping on a rock who awoke as the tide came in. Waves rolled over their stony and ephemeral home, gently carrying them back to their home in the sea. A few days later at the glorious Point Arena, as we picnicked on a blanket nestled low in a field of tall palomino grass, a father and son on a nearby path peered at us as if we were deer.

We were two peas in a pod, on this voyage of exploration and discovery - very much living the life we said yes to when we fell in love at first sight. As we made our home in funny little hotels and rustic lodges, we had everything we needed. We found a sense of belonging in the golden ranch lands and rugged coastline, the boundless blue sky and places where great rivers emptied into the deep blue-green sea.

It was magic. And as we journeyed, my painting was effortless. The blank canvas was never daunting. An abundance of inspiration came in and my creative expression poured out onto the page, as seamless as sky to ocean. I could easily drop into a creative flow state as we lived only in the moment. Over the course of the two weeks I made some of my best work yet.

Upon returning home to our cottage in California, the concerns from before seemed to have evaporated. I felt different and I wondered “What was that all about?”. I began to move gracefully between both places, with that wonderful sense of being at home in myself. For me, home is a state of being. To feel at home is to belong - to a place, to another, to oneself. To be at home in one’s self is one of the greatest openings in life. Wherever we are or wherever we go, we are free to be.

T.S. Eliot wrote “We shall not cease from exploration, and the end of all our exploring will be to arrive where we started and know the place for the first time.” So here I am where I began: two households, at home in both. The irony is that I lost my sense of belonging in the travel between homes, yet it was travel that healed me. What was restored in me was what I’ve known since I was a child. I came all that way to discover that a picnic in the grass, painting outdoors, moving freely in the world - now with my partner - is how I feel at home in my marriage and in my vocation as a painter. I belong to the desert and to the ocean. I belong to my husband and he to me. And I belong in my own skin, as I am, in all my splendor and glory and quirks and contradictions. And this is the me that is my home, my sanctuary, my source of strength from which I live a creative life as a modern woman in the world today.

Copyright 2017 Lisa G.P. Miller. Originally published in Maker's Magazine, Volume 5 "Home", January 2018