Aligned & Awake: Everywhere and Nowwhere
From Tullamore rain to Toronto snow, I’ve learned that home isn’t somewhere you return to, it’s everything you carry forward.
Aligned & Awake
My reflections on life through travel, human design, energy, astrology, and emotional clarity. Not as a guru. Just one person figuring it out in real time.
The road remembers me before I remember it.
Wet hedges, stone walls, grass so green it hums. I take a bend a touch too fast, catch my breath, and laugh at myself like an eejit. The wipers squeak a rhythm only Ireland could write, probably in 6/8 time, like every trad tune that ever made you cry in a pub.
Radio on. GAA chatter I half follow, ads for silage and Sunday carvery, a funeral notice read soft as a prayer. The sky can’t commit. One moment, pewter, the next a patch of light like someone lifted a stage lamp and gave me a nod.
I pull into a lay-by that looks like every lay-by I’ve ever known. A waterlogged verge, a view that forgives. Sheep stare with the authority of bouncers. I apologize out loud. Habit. Canada taught me sorry. Ireland taught me to mean it.
Born here. Three years in England. Then Canada for the long stretch that made and unmade me.
My mouth holds all three.
Some days, Tullamore wraps my words.
Some days, Toronto sits in my vowels like a heavy coat. England shows up when I queue with Olympic discipline and pretend I don’t mind. I do mind.
I am still Irish enough to say I’m grand and hope you can read my eyes.
I’ve been driving the long way to everything. The scenic route feels like truth.
Past boglands, the colour of strong tea.
Past cottages with curtains that twitch in the corner like your nosy aunt.
Past the shop that still sells penny sweets for a price that would break your heart. Tayto crisps (cheese & onion of course) in the passenger seat. And tea in my tumbler. Essentials. The car smells like damp wool and possibility.
There’s a line from a beautiful and inspiring book with illustrations called The Boy, the Mole, the Fox and the Horse, by Charlie Mackesy. The boy asks, “Home isn’t always a place, is it?”. I’ve been ruminating on that line.
Letting it roll around in my mind as I drive through these backroads, thinking about the places that shaped me, the ones I left, the ones that still live in me.
Home is a temperature, not a map.
Home is a cup of tea poured by someone who gets your silence.
Home is the shape your breath takes when the door closes and you are safe.
Home is the song a road sings when it remembers your tires.
Selling my house knocked something loose. Walls gone. Keys handed back. No bed that knows my weight. My life in suitcases, and the tender shock of seeing how little I actually need.
Which is not nothing.
It is a relief.
It is also a grief.
I open the trunk to get a sweater and find a memory instead. The sweater is in another case. Of course it is. I swear like a proper Irishwoman, then smile because the rain has already decided to stop. I shut the trunk and catch my reflection in the car window. For a second, I don’t recognize her, then I do.
The mirror catches my face, and I see all the places at once.
The ten-year-old who believed being a writer was a real job, despite being told otherwise.
The twenty-two-year-old who buried her father the week she turned twenty-three.
The woman who left a life that looked tidy on paper and messy in the marrow.
The version of me who still wants to explain herself, and the version who refuses.
They all sit there, crowding the front seat. I want to let them know there’s room. I want to let them know we’re fine.
I pass a sign for a town that tastes like childhood. My accent comes back before I speak. In the café, I ask for a breakfast roll, and the woman behind the counter calls me “pet.” It warms my heart, and I smile. The roll weighs as much as a bowling ball.
Ireland solves things with bread.
Canada solves things with maple syrup and apologies.
England solves things with a cup of tea and a polite collapse under the banner of keep calm and carry on.
Back on the road. A tractor leads a procession of resignation. Nobody honks. We are all learning patience from a man in a cap doing 8 kilometres an hour. I use the time to let the question sit in my bones.
Where do you settle?
Where is your foundation?
I try to force an answer, but instead, I get a feeling. It spreads like heat from a peat fire. Slow. I let it.
I pull in at the coast when the horizon opens like a held breath. The Atlantic throws itself against the rocks like it has a grudge. Wind knots my hair into a new species. A gull shouts something rude. I taste salt and a memory of running on this very sand in cheap runners that filled with water, thinking I’d live here forever.
Then England happened.
Then Canada.
Then, in the long middle, I performed so well that I forgot to feel it. I stand there and let the sea shake me awake.
Everywhere and nowhere.
It used to sound like failure. Like, I couldn’t pick a lane. Today it feels like a key. The in-between is not a void. It is a room with big windows. It is a table with extra chairs. It is a field that says come on then, we’ll make space.
On the way back, I take a road I don’t recognize and end up exactly where I was meant to be. That happens a lot here. I stop at a petrol station for a ninety-nine even though it’s raining again. The lad behind the counter gives me an extra flake because he can. The cone drips down my hand. I lick my wrist like a cat and laugh alone in the car. The laugh sounds like my mother’s. It sounds like me.
Night comes faster here. The dark is proper. No light pollution to flatter your fear. I park outside the place I’m calling mine for now. Keys in a borrowed bowl. Kettle on. The first boil is a small blessing. Steam fogs the window, and my reflection doubles. I let both of us stay.
I sit on the floor beside the fire, because floors are honest, mug between my palms. Rain softens to something like a lullaby.
I think of Canada and feel my chest loosen.
I think of England and feel a calm settle in my bones.
I think of Ireland and feel my mouth tilt into the old mischief.
I do not make them choose. I let them braid.
Home isn’t always a place. It is sometimes a question that doesn’t mind not being answered. It is sometimes the way your body drops its shoulders at the sound of a familiar kettle.
It is a language made of rain and radios and bread rolls the size of planets. It is a steering wheel that fits your hands even after years away. It is the way strangers resemble cousins, and cousins resemble the past, forgiving you.
I finish the tea, and the room breathes with me. No grand revelation. No tidy bow. A simple agreement between my ribs and the night.
I can be Irish enough for an Aran sweater, Canadian enough to say sorry to a doorframe, and still love England for its hedgerows and its queues.
I can take all of them with me, stitched into one steady heart.
Everywhere and nowhere. I say it out loud to hear how it lands. It lands like a soft thing. It lands like a welcome mat with my name on it. The kind you don’t wipe your feet on. The kind you step over and carry inside.
Tomorrow I’ll pick another road and see who I am there. If I get lost, I’ll call it research. If I find a view, I’ll call it proof. And if the sky changes its mind every five minutes, I’ll take that as a sign I’m in the right country, and the right life.
For now, I let the dark hold me. The house is quiet. The rain turns to mist.
Somewhere, a fox screams like a banshee, and I grin because even the wild things are dramatic here. I close my eyes and hear tires on wet tarmac, waves on stone, a kettle settling, a boy asking a small, perfect question. “Home isn’t always a place, is it?”
I answer him without words. Then I sleep in the middle of my many homes, every one of them made of me.
Tell Me…
Maybe home isn’t a place for you either. Maybe it’s a feeling. A song. A scent. Tell me what home means to you below.
Beautiful. Loved every moment. Home to me is my dogs cuddled beside me. Wherever that may be.