When Roots Whisper

Recently, I spent a week with a community I’ve known for many years—dear people who have walked beside me through different chapters of life. Being with them stirred something deep within me: a quiet, persistent nostalgia, a gentle ache for familiar places and past rhythms that once felt like home.

That week awakened memories I didn’t realize I missed so deeply.

This sense of longing arrived hand in hand with the reality of building a life in a new country. The contrast between the comfort of the known and the vulnerability of the new made my inner world feel tender, raw, and very alive.

Home is Where the Wounds Are

In that gentle chaos of reunion, something unexpected stirred: the ache of unresolved grief. Family wounds I thought had scarred over cracked open once again. I wasn’t prepared for how loudly my soul would cry for belonging, for connection, for the presence of the mother I lost.

Our family, scattered across continents and time zones, had silently unraveled. Some bonds stayed intact. Others quietly frayed until the distance became more than just physical.

What I felt wasn’t just homesickness—it was soul-sickness. A deep, ancestral ache for home, for closeness, for the sacred togetherness that once was.

As I sat with my old friends—people who knew my laughter and silence alike—I couldn’t help but notice the contrast. They still had their parents, their siblings, their roots. My river of grief, held back for far too long, overflowed.

The little girl inside me just wanted her mother. Her safe place. Her origin.

I cried. I prayed. I surrendered.

I asked nature and higher forces to help me forgive—not just others, but myself. To forgive the silence that echoed through phone calls. To forgive the things unsaid and the things said in pain. To forgive the distance, the goodbyes whispered and those that never came.

Belonging Begins Within

In those heavy nights, I turned to creativity—letting my emotions spill onto pages and canvases. I created not from structure, but from feeling. Through abstraction, through non-linear images, I began piecing together something raw and honest.

I wasn’t trying to “make sense” of the pain. I was trying to honor it. To give it space. To give me space.

And slowly, a quiet truth emerged: Belonging is not always a place. Sometimes, it is a process. Of holding yourself when no one else does .Of rooting into your own being when the world feels unfamiliar. Of remembering that grief and love are two sides of the same coin.

Maybe family doesn’t always look like it used to. Maybe home is not just where we came from, but where we choose to return—again and again—within ourselves.