The Audacity of Staying Home

Committing to a slow and gentle life.

When I was a child I spent a lot of time home from school. Those days were magnificent solitude.

In retrospect, the reality was that my nervous system couldn't (and still cannot) handle being around people all day every day. A few times a month, my body manifested symptoms in the morning that were, in many cases, gone by the time I was home alone for the rest of the day. I was always pushing the edges of school absence policy, but I got away with it due to never falling behind academically, so there was little anyone could actually reprimand me for. In fact, I now believe that staying home was likely key to my academic and executive functioning in those days, as it is key to my professional and executive functioning now.

When I would stay home from school, I would take baths, I would take a bowl of cereal into the garden for a late breakfast, I would carry a book across the street to the Ashram that raised me and sit in the garden temples and read for hours. I would do housework that no one asked me to do, ironing napkins or dusting my great grandmother’s china cabinet, and neglect the housework that was mine to do. In a word, I followed my innate need for pleasure.

(How strange it is that in a world and an age in which we actually do have the resources and technology for everyone to have enough, manufactured scarcity keeps a daily experience of pleasure restricted to either the very privileged or those who resist and reject the conditioned hustle of capitalism. I exist in the overlap of that venn diagram, something I’ll be exploring more in this space in time.)

Fragments from moments home alone over the years.

These days were my glory, the solitude my refuge, this home, my home, a heaven.

On those days, I often dreamed of a future life in which I would be able to spend many days just like that. I dreamed that I could stay home, stay in the garden, flow through the house chores that I desired. In this dream, I would research, study, and create as I desired, and I would be respected in my field, but I would not be beholden to institutional demands that took me away from the rhythm of my body or the rhythm of the earth.

This was my most secret dream for my life. It was a dream that felt forbidden in a world of possibilities, careers, cities to live in and ladders to climb.

I have been blessed to always be surrounded by people who believe in my ability to succeed at anything I put my mind to, and it felt retrograde and ungrateful to imagine that my life would be as quiet and simple as this. And in a world heavy with narratives of needing to go out in the world, work in bustling offices, hustle and compete for accolades and advancements, it seemed an absurd fantasy that I could possibly become respected in any field while wearing soft and flowing clothes from the ease of my home.

And yet, that is exactly what has happened. Due to a combination of privilege, grief, adaptability, sacrifice, and the generosity of an incredible mother, I have landed back in the home in which I have always sought refuge, this time with a husband and, at the time of move-in, a belly ripe with new life, eager to be born into this sanctuary.

Now, just under 4 months postpartum, we are settling into this new-old home, and I am reflecting often on the moments of my life that brought me back here.

Fragments from the last days before birth, just a week or so after we moved into the house together for the first time.

These were times when I was still in my maiden life in which I’ve surprised myself by coming home to settle for a while.

I took a semester off of college to move through some intense grief and psychological turmoil- that time felt like jumping off a fast moving train, a train that everyone told me I had to stay on to get where I needed to go. When I jumped off I felt like I could finally breathe the air, wander nonlinearly, and choose when and how to get back on that train. And I did, choosing to focus on pleasing myself more than competing with peers or proving my worth to an institution. I never again took more than 3 classes at a time, and went to the waterfront to watch the sunset every day.

I came home to finish my thesis at the end of college; having completed my course load and being in love with my campus and my friends, I knew it would be a struggle to finish my writing when my heart ached to be with others all the time. Retreating to the solitude of this house, I taught myself the form of erotic, self-loving discipline that now shapes my life. I developed the systems and routines to consistently, enjoyably, show up for my work, and I got the work done.

After college, I planned to move to India, first to visit with my estranged father, and then I intended to travel to Auroville, to learn from that grand experiment and see what direction my dharma would take me. But my father was diagnosed with pancreatic cancer and he ended up returning home himself, to seek treatment, and, ultimately, a peaceful death. I stayed home to see that grief and challenge and blessed time through. During that time, I felt terribly conflicted at the sense of my life being put indefinitely on hold for a grief that was complex and at times unbearable. I moved away from this house for half of those 18 months to have some space for my own processing, away from family, but close enough to still tend to the life and death initiation we were all going through.

My wedding took place just at the beginning of covid, a ceremony and celebration that moved to the back yard in this home at the last minute, and turned out to be more intimate and sacred and beautiful than we could ever have imagined.

At the time, my husband’s business required him to live in a town that had nothing for me but him, so I chose my own life and stayed home and we spent weekends together for the first year of our marriage and pandemic. It was a powerful time of deeply intentional time together, cultivating an ethic of rest and enjoyment that we now weave into every day of our lives. To many, the idea of living separately in the first year of marriage might sound miserable, excruciating, or simply extremely odd. But we credit this with nurturing within us a deep appreciation for the time we spend together. We do not take our days home, together, for granted.

Our wedding ended up in our home, with just a few people at the beginning of covid. These photos, taken by my only wedding guest and beloved friend Thais Aquino, show my moments alone in the house just before the ceremony.

Covid also brought a change in how the world works. No longer was I regretfully turning down invitations to events across the country or around the world; everyone was suddenly using zoom, a software that I’d depended on for years to do my work and education over distances due to the remote town I live in, and the limitations of my disabled body. And I was able to show up, not because of a change in me, but due to the change of venue. Zoom events and online communities and hybrid experiences opened the world to me more than ever before, and made my childhood vision for my life even more possible. I developed relationships during early covid that have turned into business partnerships and profoundly important, life changing friendships. And when those friends and business partners come to visit me here, they understand why I don’t live anywhere else. (Recently, one of them came after a whirlwind week at Art Basel Miami, and reflected the whole time, that this simple rich life in the jungle garden is a truer wealth than most of the millionaires and billionaires at Basel will ever know, and I cannot argue with that.)

I left home again for a while beginning in 2021; we had a year’s lease in the city we love, where a combination of concrete and brackish water, old trees and fast traffic, sunshine and fresh juice shaped my experience of intensely focused business development while preparing to become, and then becoming, pregnant.

It was the week that we confirmed the pregnancy that my mother, in meditation, had the thought to leave the home she’d held for us for decades, to move into the other side of the duplex, a Tibetan Buddhist Dharma Center, to give us the whole residence for our little family. This was motivated partially by her new years intention to prepare for her own death, an intention that revealed to her just how much stuff she had in this part of the house, and knowing that only in death or having to move would it ever get sorted through. In the spirit of Swedish Death Cleaning, she chose to take care of it herself by downsizing and moving and making space for us and our baby.

Living under the same roof as my mother, postpartum or otherwise, is a distinct kind of blessed growth experience for another time. But to have this home with its strange and beautiful and ever changing rooms and identities cleared out and made a space for us to design, inhabit, spread out in, is a blessing beyond words.

Every day I wake up amazed to be living that childhood dream. I spend my days at home, I cook and eat when I want to, I am surrounded by the books that I love, my husband and I both have home offices that inspire and support our work, and my child gets to live a life of closeness to not only his grandparents, but the trees and herbs and wildlife that made me. He gets to wander and play in the temples and gardens that my father helped to build on the Ashram, and my husband and I get to have an environment that supports us having peaceful, regulated, nourished nervous systems so that we can be the best parents, partners, co-creators, and lovers possible.

I stay home and rest, mother, work, read, host, tend, play, daydream, nourish myself and those I love, and I count these blessings daily. Now that I am settling into life postpartum, I am, gently, committing myself to my creativity. And I am happy to say that I am, in fact, respected by my colleagues, that my work is wanted, valuable, and meaningful.

This home makes this writing possible. This home makes communing with the more than human world a natural, daily occurrence. I am curious now what else will be born here, and I am curious too to see who will join me in this journey. Thank you for being here. Thank you for tasting my world with me.

Second Trimester memories in the backyard, taken by beloved Thais Aquino

If you too dream of staying home, I’d love to hold that dream with you. Feel so welcome to comment, sharing what your ideal home life feels or looks or even smells like. I will carry that vision with you, and I believe that in radical acts of generosity and courageous acts of opting out of capitalist extraction, we can make these dreams possible with and for one another.

Written for my late father, who, one day when I was in middle school, told me how much he admired my comfort with being alone and that he felt it would serve me well. His ambition kept him from ever being able to fully enjoy and appreciate this home. I seek to strike a new balance, loving this place, committing myself to it wholeheartedly, and finding ambition on my own terms, an ambition that includes a slow delicious life, present and grateful for all that I do have.

Postscript

Reading: This essay was very much inspired by Sophie Ward Koren’s recent essay On Domesticity and The Creative Self.

Listening: The day after I gave birth, my dear friend Dani Duke (and the first paid subscriber to this substack, thank you Dani!) sent us a song called “Affirmations for Fellow Snails“ from the new album Love is the Ground by Rena Branson. If you know me and Seth, you know we freaking love snails and slugs as they remind us of our family creed, “Slow and Steady, We Go Far“. This entire album is an earthy, loving, queer exploration of love in a beautifully Jewish way, and I’ve been singing these songs every day since.

Smelling: Seth is making oatmeal for us right now, and he recently learned how to make it exactly the way I do. So I smell toasted oats and coconut flakes and cardamom over the lion’s mane coffee steaming in front of me.

Wearing: It’s a cold day (for Florida) and our windows are open to let the fresh cool air in. So I’m wearing this bear onesie that I got for Seth to embody his full Jambavan energy (a topic for another time), and which I wear at least as often as he does.

Desiring: Speaking of snails, I found this gorgeous… paperweight? Object? (Idk, I just know that I love it) yesterday while researching the goblincore aesthetic for design inspo as we remodel and decorate this house, slowly and steadily. I try to have most of our decor come from our own families / ancestors (ancestor aesthetic is yet another future essay coming along), and if not, then as artisanal as possible, but damn if that’s not a gorgeous magical snail orb that feels like it was made exactly for me.