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Readers, it’s been a minute. This has been a very heavy work summer, which has made me embrace the term “slow creating.” More on that another time, but for now, I’m happy to be writing again, sharing my thoughts on what it means to come home to yourself, indulging in late-summer harvests of peaches and tomatoes, and taking lots of naps with my familiars. In fact, this summer has been all about coming home to myself, in more ways than one… I’ve been thinking a lot about home lately. What it means to be at home in your body. In your life. What it means to tend a space and fill it with love and trinkets and velvet curtains until it’s a sanctuary. I’ve also been thinking—no, feeling, deep in my bones—what it means to have a place call you home. After all my many travels this summer, I’ve discovered that I’m never fully myself unless I’m in New Mexico. I first learned this when I went away to graduate school and was perpetually sick in a damp, dark climate (I called those my TB years, feeling more like a sickly heroine in a Victorian novel who could only be cured by extended trips abroad for my POOR HEALTH). It was only when I returned home for breaks that I felt alive again. Healed by the sun and arid climate, grounded by the earth, loved by the people who make up this land. Even the aspens seemed to dance in greeting when I saw them. New Mexico is also the place I carry with me whenever I travel, looking for signs of it in the poplar seeds falling like summer snow in Montreal (our cottonwoods do the same, filling the Bosque with an ethereal quality that makes up for the summer heat), or in the empty horizon in Dallas, where I keep thinking the Sandia Mountains might appear. It’s the heat I look for in a taco plate in Seattle (knowing I won’t find it). And while I do love travel and recognize what a profound privilege it is to be able to go to new places near and far, I’ve often found that the truly powerful journeys are the ones we embark on in our daily lives: a home renovation, a new relationship, a shift in perspective. These are the things that test our mettle and deepen our roots in the life we want to live. Home, in other words, is the thing you carry with you wherever you go and the thing you come back to when you’ve lost your direction. In New Mexico, we have a term for this sense of place: querencia. From the Spanish verb querer—to desire, to want, to love—it’s a word that roots us in place and also asks us to reach our hands to the sky. It’s a passionate word, eager to find its home inside us even as we delight in the delicious way it rolls off the tongue. It refers to a place from which you draw your strength, your magic. A place where you feel most authentically yourself. But it’s also more than that. Home isn’t just a place. It’s a way of being in the world. I think of turtles here—those wonderful animals that carry their homes with them, slowly, deliberately, unafraid of what time might do to them. Their home is an inherent part of who they are, fused to them as home is fused to our souls. Querencia, in other words, is the sense of belonging you take with you wherever you go. It carries us in the way we carry it everywhere. It shades everything we do. It guides us back to ourselves when we’re lost. And perhaps this is why the passion embedded in the word querencia is essential to understanding its meaning. After all, its root verb—querer—is not passive. It is about wanting. Loving. Desiring. Querencia asks us not only where we belong, but what we love enough to move toward. What we long for. What makes us hungry. What calls our vitality back into our bodies. That is where home is. Querencia is not simply a place you love, but a place that loves you back. I feel this every time I brush my hands along desert saltbush or globemallow—the earth knows and loves me, whispers her secrets, and is there for me when I need her most. It’s also an inner geography, mapping our desires and ways of being in the world so that we learn to live from the inside out. Querencia asks a deceptively simple question: Where do you become most yourself? Then it offers a deceptively simple solution: Go there. And when you get lost, return there until you know who you are again.
I’ve been marinating on the idea of home all summer as I return to quiet daily routines and take stock of the spaces, people, and things that make me feel diminished—incompetent, useless, disconnected, bedraggled. I notice, too, the moments when I feel more alive—vibrant, connected, playful, open. That contrast has become its own kind of compass. What makes me contract? What makes me expand? What makes me feel like I’m performing a life rather than inhabiting one? And what makes me think, yes, this is me. This is how I want to feel. This is where I want to be. Maybe finding our querencia is partly about learning to pay attention to those answers. Noticing what drains the color from our lives and what restores it. Then, whenever we can, choosing to move toward the people, places, practices, and pleasures that make us more fully ourselves. For me, that means New Mexico. But it also means my patio garden in the early morning. Coffee in my favorite mug. A classroom alive with conversation. Writing something that surprises me. Dinner with people I love. Adventures around my beloved city. Cats stretched lazily across my library windowsill. The mountains turning watermelon-pink at sunset. These ordinary things are not separate from my querencia. They are how I practice it. Querencia comes from a verb, after all. Maybe home is something we do: something we return to, over and over, in the daily work of nourishing the soul. Perhaps that is the real gift of knowing where home is. You begin to recognize the feeling of it everywhere. You learn what brings you back to life. And then you go there. Again and again. With passion. Where do you call home?
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