For years, my husband, Jack, and I dreamt about moving to Southern California. Over countless dinners, we entertained ideas of walking to my brother’s house for coffee on Sunday mornings, of getting a dog, of breathing salted air on weekend hikes, of healing our Vitamin D deficiencies nestled between the mountains and the sea. Last June, we clinked our glasses together: we were moving to California.
What followed was not as simple as planned. On our first visit to find a home, Jack came down suddenly with a terrible stomach virus and a 104-degree fever, landing us in the ER. The second time around, it took weeks to find a rental in our budget, but we eventually settled on a home on a quiet street with lavender planted in the front. A promising sign, so we thought, but only days after moving in, I turned the key in the lock and stepped straight into six inches of water: a flood had destroyed everything in its path.
We put our belongings in storage, waited months for repairs, and were eventually forced to look for another place to live. By early March, we were finally settling into the Pacific routine we had imagined. For one week, I could breathe more deeply. “Here we are,” I thought, “finally home.”
Then, life became ashen. That which seemed annoying about our year-long move suddenly seemed inconsequential. That which brimmed with hope drained. The same week Los Angeles’ stay-at-home order was implemented, Jack learned of a family member’s much-worse cancer prognosis. There would be no seaside hikes, no visits to my brother’s house, no hosting old friends or making new ones, just grief, sadness, isolation, and, sometimes, dread.
I am still in my twenties, this odd decade-long inflection point, in which questions determine radical change. Wondering, “where do I belong?” results in, for example, picking up your life and moving to the Golden State. Moving there, I craved new, deeper roots, but instead found myself standing on sand.
How can I figure out who I want to be, if I don’t know where I want to be? Are belonging, identity, purpose, and place not inextricably connected?
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I was raised in Northeast Ohio, where each season began with expectant possibility. Coming from a biracial and bicultural family, home was the only space I felt fully safe. There, I belonged, free from the dehumanizing gaze of an otherwise homogenous community, where adults and other children asked relentless questions, “What are you?” “Where are you really from?” “Where were you adopted from?” and where I witnessed worse discrimination waged upon my father.
To this day, Ohio feels most like home. Not for its towns, but for its land, where autumnal leaves crunch under foot in autumn and forest floors flush with daffodils in spring. Not for its sense of self, but for my own and for my family’s. For all the shifting seasons which feel familiar.
For college, I moved to Vermont, where the landscape was vaster and more dramatic with its ice storms and knee-deep mud. Being there felt like an experiment. I was in an incubator. Could I learn how to love, to grow, to organize, to walk on my own? In the valley between the Green Mountains and the Adirondacks, I became wilder and more elegant, more educated and independent. I learned to ask questions about epistemology, and critical race theory, and literature.
Intellectual questions landed me in Oxford, England, where I fell in love. Falling in love was not the plan. The plan was to read by myself in coffee shops, to mine the archives for insightful details, to wander down cobblestone streets at twilight. But then, on a bright, chilly morning, Jack walked into the coffee shop, where I sat reading alone, and within the hour, I had met my life-long reading partner. Oxford was a great surprise, all seasons for a year: mulled wine, church carols, Victorian poetry in the autumn and winter; wisteria and Easter in the spring; wildflowers and moving boxes in the summer; good coffee all year round.
Following our storied year, Jack and I moved together to New York City, the city of extremes, pollution, and ambition. We rescued a cat, installed floor-to-ceiling bookcases in our 1 1/2 room apartment, and learned how to batch cook. New York was the daily grind, coffee of all sorts (good and bad), new friends, walks by the river, commuting, and practicing yoga in the kitchen. And for two years, as we lived in our shoebox apartment, I commuted to New Haven for graduate school. Yale was writing at all hours of the day, the Metro North, and existential angst.
After all the crunched effort of graduate school and the unwieldy, gritty glamour of New York City collided, the idea of California’s rugged beauty was exciting: both a dare and an invitation.
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A tree cannot grow without a place to plant its roots. For many years, this has felt equally true of human beings. Rooting oneself into the ground and claiming space is like saying, “I belong here. This place feeds me, my becoming, and my generosity.” Mostly, this has been true in my life. No matter the challenges, I, like a transplant, have found ways of inching toward even limited light. The backgrounds to my education, to my love story and early marriage, to my family’s life together have shaped me.
As the pandemic rages on in the United States, Jack now wakes up in Australia, his first home, to help his family member battling cancer. I, missing him, remain longing for a home which feels like home or the shelter of my partner. The W.S. Merwin poem, “Separation,” echoes in my head each morning, “Your absence has gone through me like thread through a needle. Everything I do is stitched with its color.” More loneliness, more uncertainty, more sifting through unanswerable questions about how love, not place, might be what builds belonging.
A year ago, I could not have imagined how our California leap of faith would unfold. Who could have imagined a destructive house flood, a global pandemic, economic uncertainty, and a dire family illness would converge? These crises, however overwhelming, are teaching and shaping me, too.
I feel more like a traveler, less like a tree these days. Instead of dwelling, I walk, holding in my hands fractured pieces of hope.
I cherish the people and things which I love the most, no matter where on the map reads, “you are here.”
Sarah James is a graduate of Middlebury College and Yale Divinity School. Her writing appears in Earth & Altar, Darling, and Patheos.