“Maybe your country is only a place you make up in your own mind. Something you dream about and sing about. Maybe it’s not a place on the map at all, but just a story full of people you meet and places you visit, full of books and films you’ve been to. I’m not afraid of being homesick and having no language to live in. I don’t have to be like anyone else. I’m walking on the wall and nobody can stop me.”
― Hugo Hamilton, The Speckled People: A Memoir of a Half-Irish Childhood
We all have roots buried beneath the earth from the place in which we were born. Yet there are times when change calls us away from home. So we uproot and move to new places. We change the surroundings, abandon familiarity. We take the cloak of our childhood off and step into new skin. Some of us do it for adventure, some of us for escape, some for love. Whatever it is that calls us away from home, we follow blindly, drunk on its scent. We slowly sink into foreign soil and are baptised in borrowed seas. And there we grow. We build a home, brick by brick in whatever capacity we can. We clean the windows so that we have a view of the world around us and we start to embrace indifference, we even find comfort in it. We create families, build friendships and fall in love with strangers. We build bridges across unfamiliar waters. This new world that we have found ourselves in, is so different from the world in which we came, but we find beauty in that very sentiment. We find beauty in the difference. We unbutton our chest and allow the light to seep in. We find compassion for those we never knew. We love those we’ve never met. We may not share a native tongue but we understand each other because we are born from the same creator. By embracing change, we have a deeper understanding of our place in the world and our peace is allowed to deepen. The road to get there wasn’t easy; it took pure and constant courage. It took clinched fists. It took ripping our minds wide open and putting it back together again. It took the ability to love those we don’t know and connect to the places we’ve never been. But we made it, we started over, replanted and grew new roots. And when the wind blows and the world shakes, we’ve realised that it doesn’t matter where were standing but how deeply we are rooted. As we rotate around the sun together on this big blue beautiful world surrounded by a vast and endless galaxy, we know that we are all in this together. We are all looking up at the same sky, wishing upon the same stars, sharing the same story and telling it differently. We are all firmly rooted together, connected as one.
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