Last night, I watched a little known movie from 2018 called Burn Your Maps. This is a spoiler alert. The following is the closing monologue. Here goes:

Someday, if you’re ever lost, you can find your way home. If that ever happens, if you ever realize you’re not where you belong, don’t be afraid.

Pack your clothes and all the things you know.

Pack what other people know about you.

Then leave it all behind. And come with nothing.

Leave your maps behind, too. Rip them up. Burn them.

And come.

Even if it’s far away.

Even if you don’t understand.

Even if it’s only in a dream.

One day, you’ll be there.

Spoken by the 9 year old boy at the very end of the movie, this had me sobbing.

I have felt so lost. For so long. It is taken decades to even begin to have a sense of home. I have searched and searched with no idea of what I was searching for.

When I lived in New York, I would endlessly walk the island of Manhattan, searching. From Harlem to Wall Street. Urgently. Determined to find something. It was pulling me forward. There were pieces that felt familiar on the boulders in Central Park and the Louise Nevelson Chapel in the CitiCorp building. I kept searching and searching. On and on. Never really sensing that I found “it. The ineffable it.

Very likely related is my constant moving house. Attempts to find home. I’ve lost count, but the number of different places I’ve lived since I was born is somewhere in the 30s. 30 or maybe even 40 different addresses in a lifetime is a lot. And I’m soon to move again. I can feel it.

And people say home is where your heart is. But do they even know, for themselves, what that means?

I think that statement needs a bit of editing. Home is where your heart is. But more

all encompassing is the sense of where your soul is. This, feels like the bull’s-eye.

Where does your soul belong? Where does your soul come alive? Where do you arrive when you’ve burned all your maps and all that others know about you and even what you think you know about yourself? Where does that leave you? Maybe, “where does that take you?“ Is the better question here.

When you put down all of that baggage and burn all of the maps, and all of the masks, who and where and what are you?

This is what I’ve been searching for. But all of the trying will not get us there. Trying with our mind, with our imagination, with any bit of effort will not get us there.

We have to unclench our grip. Open our hands and our heart. And release and trust. And allow. And accept. All of us. As we are. Shadow and light. In perfect imperfection. To relax. And rest. And be.

And from there, we will know what is to be done. Not from a place grasping and doing and trying to figure it out, but from a place of knowing. From gnosis. From listening and remembering.

Letting it all go. Standing here naked. Without whatever made us us in the past. Without grasping for the future.

Standing still. Allowing. Opening. Trusting. The next moment and the next moment will reveal themselves. If we allow. If we release our attachments. Our addictions. Our maps and our masks. We will be guided.

It’s been quite the journey so far. The next steps are yet to be revealed. But the feeling, the knowing, the sense of soul is home.