The Return is Where the Real Journey Begins
Field Notes from the In-Between
There is a Setswana saying that has stayed with me:
Motho ke motho ka batho.
A person is a person through other people.
And maybe that’s what travel gives us most
The people
The moments
The mirrors we never expected
But there’s another line I carried home with me
One that isn’t a proverb
But felt like a truth whispered from the land itself
You do not go to the wild to find the wild. You go to find yourself
And I felt that
In Botswana
Among the acacia trees and morning birdcalls
No mirrors
No makeup
No shoulds
Just the pulse of the earth underfoot
The laughter of women around a fire
And a reminder of how little we need to feel fully alive
I had just spent nearly seven weeks hosting sold-out retreats in Greece and Botswana
In Greece, it was golden-hour glamour
Linen dresses and lip gloss
Laughter echoing off whitewashed walls
A kind of sacred celebration
Of sisterhood
Of sensuality
Of being seen
But Botswana was something else entirely
It was the wild
Not just in setting
But in sensation
There we let it all down
Literally and spiritually
We shed layers we didn’t even know we were wearing
We sat in our skin
We looked inward
And we let the land hold us
Travel expands me
But coming home asks me to contract just enough to carry it all with me
To fit the vastness of what I’ve just lived into the rhythm of the everyday
I always think I’ll slide right back in
But there’s this subtle standoff at the threshold
Even with my husband
My love
My anchor
My person
There is a moment
An ache
A pause between who I’ve been out there and who I am here
We curl up together
We catch up
We laugh
But part of me is still barefoot in the bush
Still out under the stars
I’ve learned to meet myself gently in this space
To not expect seamlessness
To allow the dissonance
Because this is where the stitching happens
Where I sew together the sacred and the ordinary
Where I bring the wild home
I do it, quite literally, at my altar
With sea glass from the Aegean
With a stone the colour of lion’s eyes
With something small that holds something big
Memory
Magic
Meaning
And I place it gently among the others
Proof of where I’ve been
Who I’ve become
What I want to remember
The wild lets us unravel
We drop the roles
Untie the ponytail
Forget about the mirror
We sweat and soften and walk barefoot
We find beauty in the curve of a horizon
Or the creases in each other’s eyes
We remember how to be seen without needing to be polished
And then we come home
To laundry and emails and the hum of routine
To the mirrors again
To the expectations and errands and that inner voice that starts whispering
You should be more productive
You should be back on track
You should be doing better
But I’ve started to see this part
The return
Not as the end
But as the beginning
Because this is where the integration begins
Where the stitching of who I was out there
Meets who I am here
I carry it all
The wild and the wonder
The barefoot mornings and the full-face evenings
The woman who walks softly through ancient lands
And the one who unpacks the groceries
And after six or eight weeks
When the ache begins again
To go
To see
To feel something new
I let her stir
That nesting gypsy in me
The one who keeps roots and wings in the same body
Because I no longer believe I have to choose
Home is my altar
But the world is my teacher
And both are sacred
