all the way back home
Having just landed in London, my heart—relentlessly shaken like a snow globe during my time in Switzerland— was politely requesting a quiet moment to settle.
It’s common knowledge that our early years shape us in profound ways (thank you, Freud): the nostalgic flavours with teleportation powers to our childhood (hello Zweifel paprika crisps, Ovomaltine and impossible-to-describe Rivella); the relationship patterns we unconsciously recreate in an attempt to heal our parental ones through unsuspecting partners (it’s fine— they are doing the same); the original blueprints we’re handed about who we are, who others are, and what the world is.
Being in our point of origin has a way of illuminating the very foundations of our lives, atop which everything else has been built. Whole identities are often shaped around those early happenings, those primordial experiences echoing through us for the rest of our lives.
It’s where the arduous and miraculous journey of being human both begins and ends: from childhood’s naked freedom to the early seeds of the lessons we’ll spiral towards again and again for the rest of our lives.
So the path goes: the innocence, the becoming, the unbecoming, the conscious return to innocence.
It reminds me of T.S. Eliot’s words: “We shall not cease from exploration, and the end of all our exploring will be to arrive where we started and know the place for the first time.”
After some days in Basel, I returned to my hometown, Luzern, for the first time since my grandmother passed away. I wanted to visit my brother Andrew (who has cerebral palsy, is my greatest teacher of gratitude—I can walk! talk! how miraculous!—and has been my guardian angel since my birth), as well as my grandparents’ grave.
They are interred at the English Cemetery, near their old house. There’s something rather magical about that—a little wink from my grandmother’s British ancestors, perhaps.
I sat down and looked up at the swaying beech tree cradling us. Where are “they” now? Have they bloomed anew into a flower? A cloud? A star? Has their spirit already volunteered for a fresh experience—a baby born somewhere, ready to begin again?
I thought of Rumi’s idea of the Shab-e Arus—the “wedding night”—his term for death. Not an ending, but a union with the Divine Beloved: an ecstatic wedding with eternity. The word for death in Aramaic, one of the languages scholars believe Christ spoke, is “existing elsewhere.” Ever since hearing these versions of death, it has felt less like a sudden finale and more like a homecoming. (The stories we tell ourselves are very important. What story do you hold about death, dear reader?)
After asking my grandparents for their blessing and support in tending to whatever may yet remain unresolved in our family line, I walked from the cemetery to their home as a quiet pilgrimage over the hill, to the one place that had remained unchanged throughout my life.
As I reached the crest, I drank in one of the most breathtaking views I’ve ever witnessed: the blue Alps all around me, the shimmering Vierwaldstättersee, and the sparkling champagne air. So achingly beautiful that some instinctual part of me wanted to kneel and bow before what felt like the first cathedrals—the oldest holy places.
I’ve danced, played, cried, and laughed to this view for as long as I can remember. It’s the path I’ve explored on countless walks—sometimes with music in my ears, other times it felt almost sacrilegious to wear headphones. Often, I let the wind be the song, carrying the voices of the mountains.
Greedy, like a lover trying to memorise every detail of the beloved before a final goodbye, I kicked myself for not having paid more attention over the years. For not having taken it in slowly, little by little. But lifetimes wouldn’t be enough to absorb it all—its glory too immense to swallow.
When I arrived, the house looked much the same from the outside. My grandmother’s violet hydrangeas were still in bloom, but the shutters were drawn. The soul of the house had departed, and yet the shell it left behind was heavy with memory.
I walked past the blueberry bushes. I used to adore picking them every summer—stuffing 70% into my mouth with tiny hands, reluctantly placing the rest in the basket. My grandmother would bake buttery blueberry muffins for me (which she continued to do until the very last time I visited her).
As they’re selling the house, this may have been my last chance to be this close. To say goodbye.
I picked the ripe berries again, perhaps for the final time. I popped them into my mouth, hoping to absorb every bit of that house into my body. To keep a part of it inside me forever.
I thanked the house for all it had held over the decades for three generations of us. Then I slowly descended the hill, past the neighbour’s heaving vines, heavy with green grapes (they are winemakers). Cows looked at me, ears twitching. Horses nodded their heads. Roses dotted the path, holding me gently in their pink fragrance as I walked down.
I took Bus 24 to Verkehrshaus, where my grandmother used to take me for concerts, imax films, and the planetarium. I remembered the first time she spoke to me about cosmic consciousness— her awe at the universe as a vast, connected, unified whole.
Then I strolled along the lake towards Luzern’s old town. I wondered if I would be back. If I still had a place here.
I looked around and felt the mountains and the lake take me in—as if putting a warm blanket over my shoulders. As if embracing me. As if saying:
This is your home.
We are your home.
You are ours.
I, who thought I had lost my place in Switzerland, gave myself completely.
I allowed myself to be taken. All the way back home.
May we always remember that we can never lose what lives within us, nor be lost to that which holds us all.
in love,
jeanine ♡✧˚