Returning

What we bring back

There is a moment in every labyrinth when the centre is no longer enough.

Not because it has failed us.
Because it has given what it came to give.

The centre is not a place to live.
It is a place to receive.
And then, somehow, we have to turn back.

Not backwards.
Back through.
Back along the same path, with different feet.

I have been thinking about this as I return from this May of crossing oceans, visiting people, being hosted, walking old streets, sitting in other people’s kitchens, sleeping in borrowed beds, laughing at tables where I do not have to explain myself.

There is a particular nourishment in being with the people who knew you before you became polished.

Before the website.
Before the credentials.
Before the careful sentences.
Before the life you built in another country.

They remember other versions of you.

And sometimes, in their presence, those versions return.
Not as regression.
As restoration.

A university friend tells me she likes how I dance everywhere.

I had not known I did.

Or perhaps I had forgotten.

Perhaps some parts of us are only visible when witnessed by those who have known us across time.

Returning this time also meant returning to my Mam’s house, perhaps for the last time before she moves.

Among old papers and photographs we found a cabinet card of my great-great-grandmother Annie Clarke, taken sometime around 1885.

My Mam only knew the name written on the back.
Nothing more.

Annie looks directly into the camera.
Not timidly.
Not sentimentally.
Directly.

As though she expects to be seen.

At the time of the photo, she would have been a cook in a stockbroker’s house in East Molesey, having come from a line of charwomen—women whose labour lived mostly inside other people’s houses.

Scrubbing.
Carrying.
Cleaning.
Enduring.

I could not stop looking at her face.

Something about the steadiness of it.
The lack of performance.
Not posing.
Presence.
Internal and external.
Bodies carrying bodies.
Space held within space.

On our final walk, an older couple and their grown son stood scratching their heads at the labyrinth entrance, confused by the sign calling it a maze.

They kept stepping off the path directly toward the centre.

I wanted to explain it to them.
Show them where to begin.
And then I didn’t.

For reasons I still do not fully understand, it felt important to let them have their own experience of it.

Perhaps this too was part of the return: releasing the need to show the way unless asked.

Returning asks something different from releasing and receiving.

It asks:
What will you embody now?

Not what will you explain.
Not what will you post.
Not what will you turn into a lesson.

What will live differently because you have been changed?

Perhaps I return with more permission to be hosted.
Perhaps I return with more tenderness for the part of me that longs for an everyday village.
Perhaps I return with more trust in the villages that already exist.

The yoga studio.
The weekend connection with friends.
The daily walking companion.
The distant beloveds.
The remembered dead.
The ones who meet me in airports and train stations.
The ones who walk beside me for a while.
The ones that share their dreams with me.
The ones who say, without knowing they are saying it:
You belong.

The feather still sits in my memory as I write this.
Small enough to overlook.
Light enough to lose.

A reminder that not everything we carry home arrives as certainty.

Sometimes it arrives as a trace.
Something that asks to be held rather than explained.

And perhaps that is the real return.

Not coming back to the same life.
Coming back able to see it differently.

The labyrinth does not take us somewhere else.
It brings us back to where we are.

Altered.

Carrying less of what was never ours.
Carrying more of what is.

The hollow.
The distance.
The nourishment.
The path beneath the feet.
The ordinary courage of returning.