I Found Home

There are places in our lives that become more than places. They become markers. You can return to them years later and realise you weren't simply standing in a particular patch of earth. You were standing at a threshold.

For me, one of those places was Livingstone National Park. The first time I went there, I thought I was going looking for clarity. I didn't know then that I was driving towards the end of a life I had spent decades building.

The noise of the world fell away as I drove deeper into the bush. No reception. No messages. No escape routes. Just the road, the trees, the earth beneath me and everything I had been carrying.

I thought I was going into the wilderness to find myself. What I didn't understand was that the wilderness was going to show me what I could no longer pretend not to know.

The woman I had been—wife, mother, carer, mediator, survivor—was beginning to dissolve. Something underneath her was beginning to breathe. The quest became a threshold. And when I came home, I knew. My marriage was over. Not because a ceremony had told me so. Because something inside me had finally become quiet enough to hear the truth.

Months later, in the thick of the separation and divorce, another invitation came. Another Vision Quest. I said yes immediately. But life had other plans. The house was being sold. There was no space left in that particular season to disappear into the desert with strangers. So I didn't go.

At first, that felt like another thing I had lost. But perhaps I was learning something important. The ceremony wasn't the destination. The transformation was.

So I created my own ceremony at home with four close friends. We opened sacred space. We spoke our intentions. We sat around the fire. And eventually, I went somewhere inside myself that I can still remember with extraordinary clarity.

I saw mycelium threading through everything. Connection everywhere. Nothing separate. And then Bear came. Bear has always been a guide for me in journeying. I asked him what I was afraid of. The answer was simple. You are afraid of being loved. Love hurts.

And then came the lesson I wasn't expecting. I was shown another kind of love. Love without judgment. Without control. Without anything demanded in return. I understood, somewhere deeper than thought, that love could simply hold you.

And when I came back, I cried. Not from sadness. From joy. I had spent so much of my life thinking love was something I had to earn, protect, prove or survive. And suddenly I understood something different. Love could be a place I rested.

And then life moved on. As it does. There were years I couldn't have imagined from that place. And somewhere along the way, without really noticing it happening, I began to create something I now recognise. Home.

Five acres. Bush. Tall trees. Horses. Dogs. Gardens. Old timber. Dirt tracks. Mushrooms that appear after rain. Little fairy rings scattered through the grass. A place that asks to be tended. A place that gives something back.

Sometimes I look around and laugh. Because I am living inside my own Livingstone National Park. The wilderness I once travelled six hours to find is now outside my door.

I thought the Vision Quest was about going somewhere remote enough to hear myself. Maybe it was. But perhaps it was also teaching me something I couldn't possibly understand then: you don't have to stay in the wilderness to remain connected to what you found there. You bring it home.

Now, most mornings, I sit outside with my coffee. I watch the world wake up. And I realise something. The woman who once stood barefoot in the wilderness asking to remember who she was is still here. She didn't disappear. She came home with me.

I used to think healing meant leaving the places that hurt. Now I think sometimes healing means becoming so rooted in yourself that the place no longer owns you. The past can remain part of the landscape without being the landscape itself.

Livingstone doesn't belong only to the woman who went there broken. It belongs to the woman who came back changed.

So now, when I walk through my paddocks and see a little fairy ring appearing in the grass, I smile. Because once, I went into the wilderness searching for a place where I could begin again. Now I wake up inside one.

I wasn't looking for a place. I was looking for home. And somehow, somewhere between the breaking and the becoming—I found it. I came home to myself.