My parents moved from rural Minnesota to suburban Southern California when I was five months old. I’ve now lived almost three-quarters of a century on the West Coast. But at an elemental level, Minnesota has always been home.
It’s the resonating center of my family’s emotional geography. Our ancestors immigrated there from Norway and Sweden. The stories my sister and I grew up with are all rooted there. And every other summer or so we would take a road trip back to visit our grandparents and walk on the ground made famous by our parents’ tales.
Last summer, my sister and her oldest daughter joined my wife and me on a journey back to Minnesota, into our heartland. We spent several days with cousins at a lake resort originally owned by one of our grandmother’s brothers. We visited three cemeteries and the graves of multiple ancestors, including one great-great grandfather. We returned to our hometown, passed the houses one grandfather built and the bakery our other grandfather operated, and spent time with a friend who had herself moved back to her childhood home in a neighboring town.
It was a journey in time, but not simply back through the past. Being in Minnesota again was like looking in a mirror at a cellular level. I recognized the vibratory rate of my homeland not simply from memory, but in my body. The muscles, bones and organs in which I live hummed with the land of my origin. I am made from the elements of this place. Because of that connection, even after decades away, it is still an indelible part of me.
I believe that connection is much more than just nostalgic resonance with family stories and childhood memories. I think that the earth elements of our bodies share a bond with the earth elements of the place of our birth, not unlike the genetic, cellular bond we share with our parents.
And because all those earth elements are forms of energy, when we return to our homeland’s energy field, to that vibratory rate, it has the potential for being deeply transformative. It’s an opportunity to stop wandering, wondering or wishing and to attune ourselves to a fundamental aspect of who we are.
This is different from the influence of our family history and connections. Those may be deeply positive or negative or highly ambivalent. But the geography of place is much less emotionally charged. Its energy hums at the slower, steadier rhythms of the earth…and our physical bodies.
I believe that standing with intention in our body in our place of origin recalibrates our entire microcosm, not unlike restoring one of our electronic gadgets to its factory settings. It’s a healing act.
I’m not suggesting that we can only truly be our self by residing in our birthplace. Energy isn’t bound by distance in the way that matter is. Regardless of where I am, if I just think of Minnesota in a quiet moment I can begin to feel the re-attunement of coming home. I could do the same as a child as well. It was always a talisman for me. If that’s true, we don’t even have to visit in order to benefit from the connection with our origins.
But if we do take the extra step of going back to the place of our birth for a reset, we can pause for a moment and then continue on our journey renewed, refreshed and reawakened to a life connected.
tadpolejourneys 