It’s good to be home. After a couple of weeks visiting my family back in Canada, with yet another heat wave (40C with the humidity!) I can honestly say that I’m grateful to be back in Suffolk. It feels like autumn has arrived here, as it has back in Canada (the day after I left, it turned to a lovely 21C and the leaves beginning their autumnal splendour) and the change in the air is most welcome.
As always, going back to visit my family brings up contemplations of just what “home” really is. I realised that in 3.5 years, I will have lived in the UK for as long as I have lived in Canada. Over twenty years of eating food grown in this land, drinking water from local bore holes and reservoirs, breathing in the air and connecting with the different flora and fauna relative to this place and this time. It really has shaped me, alongside the people I’ve met and the experiences I have had, and I am both grateful and a touch melancholic when reminiscing about all that I have done and gone through in moving to this new land all those years ago.
This is where I made my lifelong dream come true, to be an author. Never did I ever dream about establishing a Druid College, or a belly dance company, or a host of many other turns my life has taken. It’s been a challenge and a blessing, the twists and turns my life has taken, and for which I am both proud and humbled to have come out the other side. England is not the land of Madam George and roses, as Sinead O’Connor once sang, but it is the place that captured my heart, alongside Wales, Scotland and Ireland.
So I return to my home with a renewed sense of place, of home and indeed, of belonging. Even though I will always carry a thread of being an outsider, with my accent alerting people to the fact that I was not born here, still I feel like this place is home. An immigrant to this country, coming from a long line of immigrants to various countries, I feel a shared connection both to my ancestors as well as to the ancestors of place, which here in the UK are so varied from before history even began. I have a few months now to breathe deeply, to take the time to reconnect, now that my new book for Llewellyn has been sent off and revised. For the rest of the year, I will be taking information in, taking in the sensual and the ecstatic, allowing the awen to flow into me after many long months of being on the other end. Allowing myself to reap the harvest sown earlier on. And so the cycle continues, in and out, flowing and ebbing, as I gather my resources ready for a new round of work come the new year. For the next three months, I will be listening to the words and voices of others, allowing their inspiration to fill me, and see where that takes me.
And in the meantime, I shall walk this land, the sandy soil of heath and woodland beneath my feet, the wind blowing in from the sea and scenting the air, the hearthfires burning both in the little village around me and within my soul.
P.S. Here’s a sneak peek at the cover of my new book, coming out next summer!
Down the Forest Path 
I too am an immigrant …British, but living in country Victoria, Australia. I feel that home is here, where I am, but when I go back to visit family and friends, I put on that cardigan of familiarity and, to shed off when I return….however, it’s always there available when needed.
Good luck with your book.
Thank you!
Beautiful book cover!
Thank you!
This is a smashing book cover, Jo. Though an immigrant to the UK I never went back to the US. It is not a place I feel connected to in any way. When I first came to Iona in November 1994 I knew where home was, though it was not that island, it was these islands where the gods and ancestors and spirits of the land spoke to me, called to me, held the tight during my ordeal to remain here. It is always good to know where home is and where home was if you return to the land of before here. You have made these islands your home and they had responded to you with fulfillment and joy, even if at times there were challenges and a twinge of wistfulness. I helps to remember that everyone on the planet is an immigrant somewhere in their family line, even if too far back to count the generations.
Very much so! x