Portland, OR
Elevation: 50ft.

“I wanna be where the talk of the town is about last night when the sun went down…”
- Jack Johnson

Growing up the definition of “home” was black and white for me. It was where my Mom, Dad, brother, and Grandparents were. Home was the safe and familiar place I would open my eyes for the day and close my eyes for the night. Through these past few years of living, loving, and letting the world in I can say that home has become something much harder to define. It is not a place or a people, rather, home has become that feeling of familiarity. Singular and extremely vast, it is the feeling of kinship with a place, a people, a time, an energy. Without getting too metaphysical, home has become where I am.

In 2015 I packed my things into my truck and moved to the west coast to escape everything that I considered home. It was spiteful, it was vengeful, it was escapist, and it was ill found. I was fed up with clashing with the energy of Northern Virginia and was terrified of the kind of person I would become if I stayed. The narcissist I am, I believed it was “them” that had to change.

The Pacific Northwest showed me many things. Things beyond my wildest imagination (I know its cliché but find yourself in front of a mountain so beautiful that you ugly cry and then come find me) but most importantly it showed me a lot about myself. I began to understand the mechanisms of my mind. How I perceived spaces around me and how I, in turn, affected those spaces. I began to learn who I was at a deeper, fundamental level. Without getting to “self-help-y”, I learned that I needed to meet the world halfway. It is here in this moment of clarity that my definition of home was refined. Home is where I found peace. Where I could be and let be.

I owe my monkhood mostly to three years of backbreaking physical labor and mental depravation, but also to the countless faces that I have been able to call my family. I came to the west coast to escape the east coast but what I found was that I needed to escape a mindset.

Today I begin my journey back to Virginia. I leave a home for a home. But like my journey west, I carry on my back not the weight of goodbyes, heartache, and fear - but the weight of home.

Mahalo for everything, and with all my love,

Chris

Written to: "Talk of the Town" - Jack Johnson (ft. Kawika Kahiapo)