Home
There is no place like home?
What is home?
Where is home?
What makes a home?
Do I feel at home?
Is “family” home?
I have just returned “home” to Tennessee from “home” in Southern California where I grew up, then on to “my place on the planet Mom's Head Gardens in Northern California, that is home at a very deep level (but had changes that felt very uncomfortable for home), then back to this spot of land I call home in East Tennessee, in the Great Smoky Mountains. I was on a journey to bury Mom with Dad in SoCal….then on for a larger trip to parts North and lands where MoonMaid Botanicals was born.
My birthplace is Southern California formed who I became in deep ways. I was a hippie. I wanted peace and love and a bigger space around me. I found that space, here in the Smoky Mountain, but must admit I do not always “feel at home” with the mountain folk. In Southern California, so many of my classmates never left Southern California. Many have become deeply conservative and religious and adopted values that I find troubling. So,though “home” as in birthplace, I am not at home there.
My beloved Northern California is, home, on perhaps a spiritual level. I love this place. I grew in Northern California in ways I would not have imagined. I started MoonMaid in Sonoma County. I learned about herbs at the California School of Herbal Studies. And yet, the very place that was solace from the burgeoning city just a few miles away…..was awash in industrial light. The dark herb garden was lit up like daylight these days. It was unsettling. And still, a place I deeply love.
For sure, here in this magical Botanical Sanctuary, it is the plants, the creatures of the mountains AND the wide and vast variety of “folks” that call this area, and this mountain specifically – home.
