Heeding the call to come Home

I suppose it wouldn’t be hard for anyone to move “home” if their home looked like this:

In March 2010, I left the UK for the first time. Armed with two very heavy suitcases and a couple of backpacks, at the tender age of 23 I was heading to the other side of the world - to start my new life in Japan as an Assistant Language Teacher. I had barely been outside of Britain before even on holiday, yet here I was - suitcase packed full of gifts for my new colleagues - heading onto a completely new continent.

After a year and a half in Japan - the most fascinating and enriching experience of my life to date - I headed to Prague, Czech Republic, where I stayed for two years as an English teacher. Life was good - easy, comfortable, hedonistic. After a while, I started to ache for more meaning. I wanted to study again, to get involved with volunteering. It was 2013 and I had already started to feel the call to help people reconnect to nature somehow. I had visions of working as a forest guide, volunteering in my space time, finding work and juggling it all with my Masters. My partner and I had a fairytale wedding and moved in with my parents.

But life back in the UK was much harder than I’d imagined. Up until then, I had only lived in the UK as a child or a student. Finding accommodation and decent work turned out to be almost impossible. I couldn’t believe it - the intense bureaucracy involved in renting a flat. The zero-hour contracts. Being treated like a naughty child in my workplace (a call centre). It was two years of barely making ends meet, barely having a social life, and arguing with my (then) husband. When I finally did get a job that seemed to be what I had been dreaming of - working with positive Psychology and wellbeing - it only lasted a few months before they fired me. They made some vague excuses about realising they didn’t really need the position; by this point, I was about to finish my Masters. We had barely any money - staying in the UK and actually surviving seemed impossible.

Then they announced that there was going to be a referendum on Brexit.

“F*ck this,” I thought, “let’s go back to Europe”.

Off we went again - one backpack each this time - and landed in Romania. Two people could rent their own flat and live pretty comfortably on £400 a month at that point, so all I had to do was teach a few Welsh lessons online. I spent the rest of my time volunteering at the same peacebuilding institute as my husband. A few months in, our relationship crumbled. I’d been ignoring my own gut feeling for a long time, until I finally couldn’t anymore.

After nine months in Romania, I was faced with a choice - should I go back to the UK again? Should I stay here, awkwardly bumping into my now ex all the time? Or should I go somewhere new?

I ended up taking none of those options - I headed back to Prague. Prague, where I already had a lot of friends with open arms and free sofas. Prague, where I even had jobs happy to open up their doors to me again. I slipped back into teaching English with ease, and spent a few months in the long, dark night of my soul, processing the divorce, learning what it meant to be alone again, and probably coming face to face with a lot of my own demons. It was where I started to learn to really love myself, and to listen to myself.

In Prague (round 2) I was able to finally ask myself what I wanted once again, instead of trying to prop up my husband’s dreams. I was able to come back to my dear, neglected coaching business, dust off the cobwebs and start again. And all the while, knowledge of the climate collapse loomed ever nearer. The voice inside me that said “we need to do something” grew louder and louder, until I knew that it was finally time to buckle down and build my business anew - so I threw myself into it, training as a coach, working towards the ICF accreditation, and training in the Work that Reconnects, to name but a few things. I found love again, not only the romantic kind, but I seemed to be making friendships with beautiful souls with barely any effort.

Then the pandemic came, and I dare say that my present form was born. I started to connect with people all over the world, realising for the first time perhaps that the internet could actually be used to befriend environmental activists from all over the globe, that it was insane to “other” people in refugee camps or in the Global South because I could actually have Zoom calls with them and befriend them! From the comfort of my bedroom, I was suddenly more widely connected than ever before. And yet - I couldn’t go home.

“Home” - North Wales. Where my parents are. Where I had managed to visit at least once every 8 months up until now. A place I took for granted - with its stunning beaches, mountains, rolling hills, clean air, and cute little towns. A place I had left as soon as I could because I didn’t feel that I fit in. A place that had been too rural and dull for me in my younger years, and yet as I headed into my mid-30’s, the idea of peace and quiet was more and more appealing.

The fact that I couldn’t get home to see my parents hurt like a knife. It was worse for many, of course - those who couldn’t be with their family members in their final moments, for example. But knowing that my family, my land, was over a small jump of ocean that was suddenly out of access for me was chilling. Who would have predicted that countries would have locked their borders due to a pandemic? I’d thought about climate change, economic collapse and all kinds of things, but this one had blindsided me.

In May 2021 I was finally able to go and visit - a year and a half without seeing my parents. The weekly phonecalls had brought us closer than perhaps we had really been in years. The 10 days of lockdown in their house passed smoothly, and the entire month I spent in Wales was a dream. Something had shifted. In the months that I’d been studying Ecopsychology and deepening my relationship with nature, it seems that something had subtly opened within me. When I came back and sat atop the Foel, the hill in my village, I felt as it I had been reunited with an old lover.

But there was something else, too. Ah, shit… I thought, knowing what it was.

It was bloody “hiraeth”. Hiraeth is a Welsh word for longing, homesickness, nostalgia. We like to claim that it can’t be accurately translated. Perhaps because it’s a particular phenomenon to Wales? Nah, I doubt it, but there is something hard to shake about this place. Had I been from somewhere uglier, dirty or noisy I doubt it would have been quite as strong. But who knows.

From then on, I couldn’t meditate - because every time I did, I burst into tears. I had accessed a deep grief - grief that I wasn’t home. Grief that I didn’t think I COULD go home, because I had fallen in love with a foreigner again, and Brexit meant that the visa system was going to be much, much harder this time around. Grief because I saw the mess my country was in - you only have to look at the news for a few minutes to see the horror show that is UK politics.

And yet… the more I looked, the more the flaws and failings of the Czech Republic started to become clear to me. Prague is beautiful, but the cost of living was flying up at a rate far faster than the salaries, which had barely shifted in ten years. Czech politics was like a bad parody of British politics, its corruption not even trying to hide itself. Besides, I knew I was never going to get my head around that language, and my close friends started slowly moving away one by one. On top of that, new friends I’d met online had all started to “hear the call” to return back to the UK - friends from Scotland, England and Ireland.

I wondered - is the UK calling us back? If so, why? Or has COVID just made us all rexamine our priorities?

In the end, the call became so strong I couldn’t do anything else but set a plan in action to return back - with no real plan. I came to the UK again in March 2022 and sat on the Foel. After a long while, a clear knowing made itself present to me - almost a voice, that said “we’ll all be here by Christmas”. I laughed. Christmas seemed so close - and we all knew that the visa processes in this country took forever. I tried to discount the ‘voice’ as my imagination or fancy.

But hey - guess what? We’re a week away from Christmas, and we’re all here. The visa process went so smoothly that it’s hard for me not to think that it was really meant to be. Yes, we did send in the most organised, well-explained application you ever did see, but I also suspect some kind of miraculous intervention.

Just two months ago I landed back in my childhood home, my dear parents opening their homes up yet again until I find a place to live. It feels surreal and strange to be back, and yet - it feels like the right time. Literally a week after I had arrived, I saw a job posting for Communications Manager with an organisation in Wales that supports local communities to take action on climate change that required a Welsh speaker - and one week later I was offered the job. I can tell you that my usual experience of applying to jobs has never gone like this - I was amazed to even be offered an interview.

So here I am again; in the UK for the third time. I have no idea what the future holds, and I definitely have my fair share of disillusionment with the government of this country. And yet - the Welsh government seems to be a lot more forward-thinking, there are initiatives going on everywhere, community groups taking steps towards sustainability and adaptation, and what’s most exciting for me is that I can get involved with things (in TWO languages that I can speak) on the ground.

I’ve been exploring just what it means to be “home” with the wonderful Jenny O’Hare and Jennifer Ramsay recently, two women hailing from Celtic lands who’ve also been juggling that same question. If you want to join us on a 6-week journey of storytelling, visualisations, land connection practices and exploration around the topic of ‘home’, read more and join us here.

It’s been hard to leave Prague behind - the strong community of friends I have there, my garden, the relative ease of living (despite the language barrier) and the amazing public transport. I have no doubt that I will miss it and want to visit as much as ethically and financially possible… but I’ve spent the last few years honing in to my own intuition and learning to really listen to myself, and so in the end I’m glad I heeded the call to come home… even if I have no idea what 2023 is about to bring.