A House Is More Than a Home

Has a place ever known you before you fully knew yourself?

Did a room, a doorway, or a stretch of land ever teach your body that it was safe to belong?

And when it was time to leave, could you feel that the place had changed because you had lived there?

I didn’t love this house when I first saw it.

I remember walking through it and feeling the ick. It wasn’t what I had imagined for myself. Where’s my granite countertops and jetted tub?!? From the home I shared with my husband, this kinna felt like a downgrade.

But divorce was moving forward, and I had to leave. So I settled for what was available, what I could afford, and what was offered to me on a silver platter.

I needed a home. But I was a little bummed about this one.

Perhaps not at the house itself, though it probably absorbed some of the blame. I was angry at the narrowing of my life. Angry that I was choosing from necessity rather than desire.

Still, I moved in.

There was one thing I loved immediately.

The freakin’ Doctor Who door.

Someone had painted an interior door to resemble the TARDIS, deep blue with white windows and the familiar police telephone sign. It opened into a room that would eventually become my sacred space.

It first served as my daughter’s bedroom but later morphed into my office when my doors shut during Covid. That room became my most sacred of spaces. The “bigger on the inside” spaceship where my work could flourish and expand.

But I truly fell in love with the house about six weeks after I moved in.

I came home one day and realized with surprise, that I was happy to be there.

Not merely relieved. Not simply safe. Happy. Free!

There was no one inside to negotiate with. No atmosphere I had to read before entering a room. No need to make myself smaller so someone else could remain comfortable.

I could simply come home.

The realization moved through me with a kind of glee I hadn’t felt in so long that I’d almost forgotten it was available.

This place was mine.

Not in the legal sense. Not forever. But in the way that mattered then. I could fill the rooms with my own life.

The house gave me sovereignty before I had language for what it was giving me at all.

And slowly, quietly, it opened.

It held me through divorce. Through a twin flame, heartbreak and recovery. It witnessed the strange dissolving of one life and the gradual arrival of another.

I birthed and fostered a shamanic apprenticeship there.

I held activations here during Covid, speaking into screens while the world retreated behind closed doors. These rooms became classrooms, temple, office, sanctuary, stage, and community.

I survived here. I fell in love here. Not once, but twice.

I adopted my beloved cats here. I had my first yard here, even if I never knew entirely how to tend it. The grass grew wild. Plants appeared where I had not placed them. Mugwort sprouted near the door, protective and untamed. The land kept living, whether I understood what it needed or not.

And so did I.

My daughter found herself here too.

She moved through high school inside these walls. She began separating from her father and becoming more distinctly herself. The house held her adolescence, her becoming, her departures and returns.

It held both of us as we learned the shape of our new lives.

This house watched us become women.

And this majestic unassuming house allowed Egypt to arrive.

That sentence alone may contain the whole mystery of it.

Egypt came through these rooms first as mystery, remembering, teaching, and transmission. The lineage deepened here. The book began to take form here. What had lived inside me for years began stepping into the world.

The house didn’t simply shelter my life. It gave my life somewhere to happen.

We tend to speak of houses as structures.

Walls. Floors. Rooflines. Plumbing. Square footage.

We speak of the number of bedrooms, the amount of storage, the condition of the kitchen. We calculate what a house costs and whether we can afford it.

But a house is more than the materials that make it.

A house becomes archive.

The walls absorb the music we play, the arguments we survive, the prayers we whisper, and the names we call through hallways.

The floors remember the shape of our pacing. Doorways learn the rhythms of who comes and goes. A house witnesses the versions of us no one else sees.

It sees us collapsed on the floor. It sees us begin again.

It sees the late-night revelations, the grief carried from room to room, the work created before anyone knows it exists. It sees who we are when the performance has ended and the door has closed.

Perhaps this is why leaving a house can feel so much larger than changing addresses.

We are not only leaving a building. We are leaving a witness, a co-conspirator.

And perhaps we’re also joining a lineage of those who came before us.

Over the years, I began collecting stories about the woman who had lived here before me. No one spoke of her dramatically. They simply told me, again and again, how kind she was.

I started to imagine that kindness still living there. In the walls. In the rafters. In the unseen architecture of home.

Perhaps some of the sweetness I felt had already been tended before I arrived. In this way the house had learned to hold a woman gently because another woman had once filled it with her kindness.

I thanked her often. Not because I knew her, but because I became something of what she left behind.

Her immortality captured as kindness.

There is a creak beneath the floor in one corner of the primary bedroom. With time, I came to feel it as a nervous place in the house. A pacing place. The invisible steps where worry may once have moved back and forth beneath the surface, wearing an invisible path.

I can’t know whose sadness lived there, or whether the creak means anything beyond wood settling into age. But houses gather feeling.

I’ve done what I could to leave this one better than I found it.

The creak remains. The anxiety beneath it doesn’t.

Whatever sorrow once paced that corner has been met with years of healing, prayer, laughter, love, cats, women, work, and becoming.

The house held me well.

And in some small way, I believe I held it too.

The walls inside that little TARDIS room hold the story of the Weeping Angels.

They’ve always been among my favorite Doctor Who creations: beings who appear frozen in stone, terrifying because they steal time.

But this house was never something frozen in stone, sucking away time as if it was lemonade. It did not trap me inside the moments when I could not move. It witnessed my tears without making a shrine of them. It held the sorrow, the fear, the waiting, and all the versions of me who stood perfectly still because they did not yet know where to go.

And then, quietly, it let me move again.

Perhaps that is another kind of angel.

Not one who waits for you to blink, but one who keeps watch while you remember how to live.

This house held my tears, but it did not become them. It held my grief without requiring me to remain loyal to it. It held my past without turning it to stone.

Recently, something shifted in my body.

Not as a thought. Not an attempt to persuade myself that everything would work out.

It was deeper than that. I could suddenly feel why this place was no longer working for me.

I have had great blessings and abundance while living here. I have built extraordinary things. I wrote books, recorded podcasts, sat with women in great transformation.

This year alone, I created the foundations for the next expression of my work through The Embodiment Gap, my website, and Living Akasa.

I wrote, taught, mentored, traveled, and began bringing the Egyptian Mysteries into language in a new way.

And yet the expansion never quite may have been cramped. The environment kept translating it back into survival. It was as though everything I created here had to pass through the atmosphere of the life I had first built here: divorce, recovery, rebuilding, making do.

The house had held me beautifully through that chapter.

But perhaps it could not also hold the full scale of what was trying to arrive next.

Not because the house had failed. Not because I had failed.

Every vessel has its shape. A cradle is not wrong because we eventually outgrow it. A sanctuary is not a prison simply because it is time to leave.

This house held the years in which I had to rebuild myself. It held the contractions, the searching, the heartbreak, the becoming.

Its work may simply be complete.

There is tenderness in realizing that I do not have to make this house wrong in order to leave it. I do not have to reject what sheltered me so I can step toward something larger.

I can be grateful. I can remember that I arrived here reluctantly and that the house received me anyway. It did not demand that I love it first. It opened. It showed me its sweetness. It gave me sovereignty.

It blessed me with a yard and cats and rooms full of women. It gave my daughter space to become herself. It held my work when the work had nowhere else to go.

It held love, grief, recovery, initiation, and Egypt. It held me while I became her.

Perhaps that is what I leave behind now. Not merely boxes emptied from rooms or pale marks where pictures once hung.

A love note.

Thank you for holding the woman who arrived here angry and afraid.

Thank you for holding the woman who survived.

Thank you for holding the mother and the teacher, the lover and the oracle, the writer and the priestess.

Thank you for giving my work somewhere to return.

Thank you for keeping the memory of sweetness in the walls, the rafters, and the unseen.

Thank you for giving Egypt a door.

Thank you for letting me become someone who can now leave you.

The new house is not something I need prove I deserve. It is not a cost my work must justify.

It is a container for the expansion already underway.

The foundations are in place.

The Embodiment Gap clarified the work. My website gave it a home. Substack gave my voice a living rhythm and a growing field of readers.

I have begun reaching outward toward publications and magazines, letting my work travel into rooms I haven’t occupied before.

Everything is ready, breathing, awaiting rebirth.

All that’s left is for me to step into it.

The next house will not create the expansion, but perhaps it will stop arguing with it. May it offer the beauty, order, space, and dignity my nervous system is finally ready to receive.

I am not asking an old version of myself to earn more while remaining inside the same conditions. I am changing the dang conditions. I am building a life capable of holding me at full scale.

And still, I do not leave this house behind entirely. The walls will always hold me. Not because I remain trapped within them, but because some part of my life has entered their memory.

The love. The teachings. The tears. The voices of women gathered in rooms. The cats in the windows. My daughter moving through the hallway.

The blue door of the timelord opening into my sacred space. Egypt arriving.

The house will carry traces of us into whatever comes next, just as I inherited traces of the kindness that came before me.

And the Earth beneath it will remain. My light added to its imprint.

This house is entering its next chapter. And radiantly, I am stepping into mine.

What will the walls remember of you when you are gone?