I accidentally took three months off writing here because… I moved to the UK! It’s been more than a year in the making and required an immense deluge of energy to get across the pond but here we are. Just in time for rainy season.
We’re here for two years and so far I’ve loved visiting castles and cathedrals, walking along the sea, visiting sacred sites like Stonehenge and Cerne Abbas (I never would have conceptualized seeing them in person). With my third house in Aquarius, I prefer shorter travels so having vast landscapes (and mainland Europe) a stones throw is so far remarkable- it just took a 9 hour plane ride, a 4 hour taxi, a 2 hour ferry to get here. We’re here for two years because I am a deeply intense person so I want to KNOW a place, not just scrape the surface. It’s the same thing in my therapy work - I don’t want to do the shallow weekend trip to your psyche, we are going to do a deep dive.
If you’re interested in the practical, travel bits of what it takes to move abroad with 2 people, 2 dogs, 5 suitcases and a guitar, I’ll be posting next week about what it takes to move abroad - before getting back into our regularly scheduled programming of scarcity!
With this life change, I often receive the inquiry “why” in its varying forms and I don’t have a really good answer. I find myself replying with casual response citing the Visa age requirements (Canadian citizens can live in the UK and work, study or be self-employed for 2 years if under 31) - but that’s more of the HOW and less of the why.
So here, I’ll try to best describe my “why”.
But first, a story back in time. My family moved back to B.C. from Alberta after I graduated high school but since I was enrolled at the U of A, I stayed behind. As a “sliding doors” moment, this decision was very important. I learned to rely on myself, to pack my apartment in a day and how to save laundry tokens.
During my undergrad, I started working in my field with houseless folks and those experiencing addictions (a field I’ve been part of for over a decade now). Starting my Masters and getting married (oops) with a well-rounded work reputation, I had no reason to leave Edmonton. So I stayed.
I knew Edmonton wasn’t “home” for me - friends often remarked they couldn’t believe I was still there. I couldn’t believe how long I stayed, either.
We often stay “too long” because we don’t know what else there is. The problem is we’re limited by our own experiences - we can’t imagine our Selves living elsewhere, especially somewhere we haven’t been because we haven’t experienced it. We often overstay out of fear, sometimes waiting for certainty, for a sign. We become complacent to the status quo because it is familiar, so it is coded in our brain as normal and safe.
I knew my way around Edmonton, around each grocery store, around the river valley. Familiarity was around literally every corner. And so were associations.
Associations like, “oh, I was married there” or “that’s the church I used to go to” (remember when I was Christian?). Edmonton became like walking through a graveyard of my past, with layers of my past Selves stacked on top of each other. It felt weighty, heavy, knowing there were ghosts of peoples’ perceptions of me haunting different corners of the city - did people still think I was married? Or Christian? It wasn’t so much that I cared what people think of me but in my very Capricorn & Scorpio way, I want people to at least have an ACCURATE perception of me.
The weight of these associations felt like concrete shoes that made it difficult to embark on the work I wanted to bring into the world. My best example for this is Jesus - I know, the irony that I’m not a Christian and quote the Bible more now than I did as an evangelist is not lost on me. When Jesus was in his hometown of Nazareth, he was unable to perform miracles. Now, why - if this is the Jesus Christian’s claim is all-powerful and fully divine - would Jesus be unable to do miracles? The Christian view, that I actually agree with, is that their perception of him inhibited his capacity. They viewed him as a petulant, carpenter’s son and that’s all. Their perception of him actually altered the expression of his divinity.
Whether Jesus was a real person or embodiment of the divine is not the point - the point is that we are impacted by peoples’ perceptions.
While I was feeling the squeeze of perception, I still didn’t know where else I wanted to live. I knew Alberta’s conservative ideals were incongruent with my own, along with the obsession with work and extracting non-renewable resources from the earth.
On a cross-country roadtrip in 2019, the most at peace I had felt was in Newfoundland, where the moss-covered rocks, overflowing cemeteries and treed horizons were the most centering forces I had encountered. There’s something about the finite space of an island that puts my body at ease - equivalent only to the ease of being on a yoga mat. Having space, without being overwhelmed with too much space, is my place of ease.
It was my partner who suggested we move to Britain. I was hesitant at first, because I had never been to Europe, let alone thought about moving there - the home of the colonizers, after all.
I did what I do when I’m uncertain - I asked my ancestors for clarity. Rarely do I receive an immediate, black and whtie answer. Instead, I experienced a softening. I was reminded neither side of my family came to Canada freely - it was an escape from famine and war. They hadn’t chosen to leave their homeland. The land that raised my family also raised me and I also didn’t have to stay. I could leave with deep gratitude to this land and also give the land back. It wasn’t my land or our land to begin with.
My ancestors are not from Britain, per se - my maternal lineage is Scottish on one side and the other migrated from the Netherlands to France to Britain to Ireland over the 15th century to the 20th. But Britain was the beginning of an ancestral invocation - one that has followed my family for generations. To complete my ancestral task, I had to return to its origin.
Living on an organic farm for the past year, I spent countless hours listening to the land. Even now, writing this, I cannot write about the land that raised me without tears welling up in my eyes. I very acutely felt this land I had grown for the last 3 decades was not my own. The more I connected to the land I was on (Treaty 6), the more I longed for my own land. The land that raised my ancestors. I longed to see the horizons my ancestors witnessed, the trees they were familiar with, the sea that carried them.
I felt an unmistakable calling to a land I had never been. Which is why when people ask, “why”, it’s far easier to say that the Visa requirements were suitable, instead of explaining I felt called by the land.
I knew on the plane from Canada that I was on a journey to return my ancestors home - the ancestors that still reside in my body. I wasn’t certain how long this would take or how I would feel but I knew that I must. When arriving to the UK, it wasn’t an immediate falling in love. Jet lag was quite disorienting and the practical bits of a move abroad overshadowed the first weeks but when we arrived to Land - in Reading, then Wiltshire - I knew.
It started with an oak in Reading then a farmer’s field in Wiltshire. I sat on the ground, put my hands palm to the earth and breathed - yes, this was it. It is quite an unexplainable feeling to be “home” in a land I had been on for less than a month but there was something so familiar here. Not familiar in the way Edmonton had been familiar, with tombstones of my past selves around every corner - but familiar in a way that my body, my ancestors, had sat on this earth before. They had tilled this land. Generations of my family were in this soil.
There is something so eerily familiar about this land, the wind, the seas, the rain. It is perhaps the stories of the land and the moors that become a character itself in stories the Bronte sisters, Dickens and Shakespeare. I’ve seen these cliffs and river streams everytime I pull a tarot card - the landscape I’ve seen for years flat on the card is before me. I see the cliffs of the Fool with its lapping waves and sun-strewn innocence with my own dogs jumping at my heels. I can touch oaks that were planted when my ancestors were here - I can walk along the sometimes raging sea.
There is no “good” reason I’ve uprooted my life and moved to a country I’ve never visited before. There is no good reason because there doesn’t have to be.
I knew I was being called and I listened.
Trusting yourself is about doing what is good and right and true for you before knowing or understanding the “why”. I didn’t know I was bringing my ancestors home until I was already on the plane. I can feel more clarity will continue to be unearthed as I listen to this land. My “why” will continue to unfold. I don’t need to have a “good”reason because I have myself.
So here’s to doing the right thing for you, making the decision other people may not understand but the decision you must make. May you listen and respond to that which calls to your inner most being.