When your land calls you, sometimes the best you can do is to garden

We’re spending this week with my family in Poland. Most days unfold slowly - marked by naps, long walks, visits with friends, and hours gathered around the table, enjoying Eastern European dishes that my Canadian husband still sometimes finds curious (with a dash of sceptical). If you’ve ever experienced full-time baby care, you’ll know that babies tend to defy linear time. Pre-bedtime can feel loud and endless, yet somehow, you blink, and the potato-like bundle becomes a walking, babbling little human.

It’s now been 18 years since I left home for university. Soon, it will be the tipping point - when I’ll have spent more time away from this place than I did growing up here. And the strange thing is, no matter how miuch time I spend reflecting, no matter how often the questions of home and belonging find me in quiet, unsuspecting moments, I still don’t know how I’d answer the simplest of them.

Where is home?

Which place is it that makes me sigh with relief the moment I walk through the door, kick off my shoes, and quietly tell myself, it feels so good to be back?

I am feeling incredibly blessed to call this place "home away from home"

I’m surrounded here by friends, neighbors, and acquaintances who made similar choices—leaving their home country in their late teens or early twenties, heads filled with ambition and curiosity. “The world is your oyster” is such a cliché, yet when I look back, I truly felt that way. The world seemed big, exciting, and full of promise. You could call it youthful optimism - but I’d argue that, in the early 2000s, the world did feel more encouraging. It was the pre-financial-crisis, pre-Covid, pre-whatever-is-happening-in-the-US era.

And now, almost two decades later, I find myself sitting in the same room where I once packed my bags for university. I send my 10-year-old daughter to fetch a few things from the grocery store, and I can’t help but imagine - if time were circular, rather than linear - she might pass the 10-year-old me on her way home from school, the two of them brushing shoulders in some cosmic overlap.

So it all feels... light and heavy. New and nostalgic. Rooted and unmoored. And whenever I talk to friends or family, the same question always comes up sooner or later: Are you moving back home anytime soon? I don’t have an answer - not yet, and maybe that’s another, longer post in itself. I do know this however: After the excitement, the movement, the city-hopping and late-night bar crawling of your twenties and early thirties, there comes a shift. A quiet stirring. A call - not to go farther, but to go deeper.

You start to wonder not just where you want to be, but how you want to live. Who your people are. What made you who you are. And how to belong again, not in a glossy, surface-level way - but in the kind of way that lets you build something.That longing, I think, can be fulfilled in two ways: by building a sense of `rootedness` in a new place you’ve come to call home, or by returning to the one that made you. Either way, what you’re reaching for is something grounding. A quieter, truer rhythm. A place to create a small world - on your own terms. Not just a place to live, but a place that can hold you. And maybe it can be as small as taking up gardening, putting your hands in the soil, or cooking a dish that you feel nostalgic about.

And on a lighter note - here are a few small things lifting my spirit lately and reminding me to pause:

• We're watching this documentary with my husband and it's so inspiring to see this man rejecting initial success to venture his own path. I loved the quote that at some point he felt the need to "be the same person on-stage as he was off-stage".

• A while back I loved listening to this podcast about coming home from your worldly adventures. She's a great story teller so maybe you'll enjoy it as much as I did.

• How beautiful is this list of 50 ways to rest

• If you're looking for ultimate sleeping comfort or want to give your friend a great nightwear, please check out this one. I'm wearing it non-stop in home office haha

• Finally, speaking of gardens and grounding, I recently bought this book and can't wait to read it.

Take good care of yourself xoxox