By Fire and Saltwater

Death of My Home Hearth

I have spent so much of my time intimately acquainted to death. Experiencing death in many forms throughout my life, trying to understand everything I could about the concept, and my ever present battle to stop chasing it through the dark means that so many of my minutes have been shrouded by the idea. At this point, I can feel when a death is coming by the first change in the wind. That’s how I knew this one was coming before the knock on the door.

For more than a year my family and I have been preparing to move. We thought last summer was when we were supposed to go. Through divine intervention we couldn’t make the move happen, which I couldn’t understand until I got my cancer diagnosis. I never could have expected what I often thought would bring my most literal death, cancer, would not really touch a death moment at all. It sat firmly in the middle of the continuation of life. Each day so similar to the ones before. There was nothing to say goodbye to, in fact the grief was not in goodbye. The grief intermingled with gratitude for staying where I was. All I could do was kiss the walls of my house that had held me through my last few barely survivable crossings into the Underworld.

The subsequent months I spent refusing to imagine what life would be like next. ‘Next’ didn’t feel like something I would be allotted, even after I learned that my cancer had not metastasized and I was clear. I had been certain my map was laid out clear before, then the floor fell out beneath me and I was in uncharted waters. All I could do was cough up everything and get my bearings. But what could I use when what I had been building was elsewhere? I had already spent the last six months only thinking about what came next. I knew it would be a disservice to my life, home, family, and self to do it again. So I didn’t think about greater time passing and simply soaked in where I was.

But time went by anyway and we have come back around to moving. I knew this move would mean a big change no matter what. My partner and I were planning on taking our two children and two dogs to move abroad. Last year our steps were more concrete, more defined from one to the next. We had immediate plans and certain choices and active work to do. This year as I felt the same need to shed where I am it was paired with a need to be untethered, to be free. But that desire wouldn’t be so easily satiated by simply walking out the front door.

Over the last few years I have learned I am autistic and have become agoraphobic. Most days my safety and comfort only feel real when I am within twenty feet of my bedroom. My agoraphobia has ebbed and flowed over the last two years of undiagnosed chronic illnesses, mental health cycles, and hidden cancer. A range of symptoms means it’s not safe for me to be alone in public for long and I have not been able to drive in years. This creates a perfect storm as an introverted, Taurus who has always loved being in my home space. (That my amazing taste means is inherently luxurious.) My practice has taken this on, too. I have considered myself a hearth and home mystic for as long as I have had a practice. I spend most of my time in contemplation of connection that feels like home, I pray at my altar, I dance with my ancestors, we ready by candlelight as a family, I even started a digital hearth (where you currently are) with my best friend to extend that connection. But life never stops, does it? (I say unironically as a lover of death.)

In recent months I have started to recover physically from the last few years. But I hope to physically and mentally recover from where I was to where I want to be with a tried and true method to break my most engrained habits: baptism by fire. I used to be able to grind from dusk ’til dawn. I used to have toddlers, work towards degrees, and cook for six hours to host a dinner party all on five hours of sleep in the same day. My secret was forcing myself to do exactly and specifically what I knew I did not want to do. I wanted to stay in bed? I would make myself get out of bed. I wanted to lay around and do nothing? I would chop, prep, and create. I wanted to turn my brain off? I would make myself write pages of notes. I ground myself to absolute dust and dissolution employing this method day in and day out before, but I don’t treat myself like that anymore. After years of being in the absolute depths of illnesses I’ve learned to be more gentle. I try not to rage so violently against myself when I need rest, not demanding performance in every second. But since the first time my agoraphobia truly roared its ugly head I have known that baptism by fire is the only way for me to push past its boundaries. Which means I ask myself the question: What do I want? The answer: To stay in the safe comfort zone of my own home and room where I can control almost every variable and never be surprised and have absolute say in who and what I come in contact with. So what do I do? Sell everything we own, including our house, to embark on an era of travel with little certainty, definition, or structure beyond what we impose. Truthfully, if my ‘safe’ and ‘comfortable’ place where I could control everything meant I still got cancer, felt desperately alone, and didn’t get to see this complex, beautiful, miraculous world we live in, then what was the point of it?

So the flames take the home and the life and the dreams I thought would last decades. I release myself off the edge of the cliff, certain the waves will catch me when I fall. (I know for better or worse as someone who has nearly drowned four or fives times.) The certainty and the structure comes from me. My team pours celebratory pride over me for not letting this moment slip by again, but also instills in me deep wells of calm to know that I, we, are capable of this. Even my practice and devotion as a mystic, usually tangible when kneeling in front of an hearth, can carry with me. They remind me that my altar’s hearth fire is always the burning one in my heart, just as true even if the hearth is no longer a single, tangible place of being. They urge me to imagine what home and place can mean if not tied to an individual home and exact place. What does it mean when my home isn’t the house I live in, but the world, the cosmos, of which I am an inextricable part? That is the contemplation they are asking me to sit with, the dried pieces of wood they are asking me to place in the hearth of my self.

Throughout these last few years when nothing has been certain and my plans have dissolved into ash a few times and ways, I have learnt such peace. Somehow, the years that have been the actual hardest to survive, are the favorite ones of my life thus far. I learned to trust myself, to trust my team and the wisdom that surrounds me. I have loved so desperately and deeply those whom I love. Parts of myself were hidden in these darknesses, and they were only illuminated by the baptisms of fire I have forced onto myself. Because that is the secret all along. The fire that was supposed to burn my life and all my comforts to the ground? It illuminated paths I would not have found otherwise. The salt water that has threatened to drown me? It was the waves that brought me to new shores of understanding. What could I have to fear with what I have already survived? What in this great big world could be so terrifying as the faces that warped from joy to bitterness at my presence? What can stop me if cancer only managed to slow me down? If destructive fire and corrosive saltwater were supposed to end me, then what other tools lie ahead in what is waiting to be alchemized?

What has gotten me through is what I have known to be true since I was the youngest child I can remember being. The core of who I am, somehow unchanging in the other infinite shifts of myself. Aligned with as much clarity of a diamond hidden beneath a mountain, shimmering with the magic of the arkenstone long hidden in a horde. I was born for this. I was born to be surprisingly tenacious, unable to be quite grasped, and unwilling to stay in the confines of what is, even if I built what is.

So today we embark on the second day of a journey whose end I can see as a mirage, but I am reluctant to entrap in too many demands so far. The life what was, that I had carved and created, is burning to the ground. That fire lights the waves the carry my life on. What once drowned and destroyed me, now useful tools for life. When I forget they are in my arsenal or I have become too complacent in my tendencies, my team has no problem hurling either option at me. But fire and salt water are no longer things I fear, instead I accept them for what they are, understanding the beauty they have helped imbue in my life.