The River Doesn't Drink Its Own Water

Emily Britton asked me a deceptively simple question for her Coming Home Global Gathering.

What does coming home even mean?

I went looking for the root of the word first, the way I do. In French we say maison, and underneath it there is rester, to stay, to be able to rest somewhere. So home, maybe, is less a building and more a place where you can finally stop performing. A place you can be you. Which happens to be the hardest thing in the world right now, when the mind is scattered and the nervous system is either shut down or quietly on fire.

We did not stay in the soft place though. We talked about feeling uprooted, me leaving that land in the Catskills after twenty years, and the stranger thing, how so many of us feel unrooted while standing perfectly still, because the place itself is changing too fast to recognize.

Like walking a trail after the storm took half the Trees.

Then it went where it needed to go, into the fire and the water of it, the practices I actually give my students for the rage, and the older grief that always waits underneath it. And somewhere in there my teacher’s words came back to me: The River doesn’t drink its own water.

A little of what we get into:

• What the word home actually means underneath the language, and why you can love your house and still not live there

• The slow, unglamorous work of rooting, and why the whole world feels unrooted right now even when we haven’t moved

• Two simple rage practices you can do alone tonight, so the fire moves through you instead of leaking out sideways

• The tribe in the Peruvian jungle whose worst emergency is when someone cannot cry, and why grief was never meant to be carried alone

• The why that lives underneath your why, and why joy, not (just) love, might be the medicine this moment is asking for

I don’t know if I answered her question. Maybe coming home is just remembering that the thing you went looking for was sitting quietly inside you the whole time, a little buried, a little shy.

Walk through and I think you’ll come out with something you can use tonight, with some gentle and yet fierce medicine for yourself and your life, not just something to turn over in your head.

🦌🔥

WATCH THE FULL INTERVIEW HERE: