Taking Root

“I love grocery shopping when I’m home. That’s what makes me feel totally normal. I love both the idea of home as in being with my family and friends, and also the idea of exploration. I think those two are probably my great interests.”

— Yo-Yo Ma

If our October had a theme, it would be Movement. There’s been so much going on here. Everything is in flux and while things change all the time – mostly always for the better even when they don’t seem ‘better’ to begin with – I’m not sure if I can quite keep up.

Lucky I have quiet Sunday evenings and my trusty wood based essential oils (sandalwood, cedar, pine, hinoki, rosewood… I love them all) to help make me feel like my feet are still are on the ground despite my head being in the stars.

When I was growing up, we had a tent in the backyard. I would retreat to this little red tent after school, taking my torch and books with me. There would be bugs and mozzies, my mother’s voice is loud and clear as she would call me in to set the table for dinner. Later, the tent would become a tool shed which I would visit from time to time, it’s musty, diesel smell from dad’s lawn mower and towers of unused furniture and knick knacks comforted me. I retreated into my own world in that tent. Didn’t have to worry about all the things an 8 year old shouldn’t have to worry about. Didn’t have to be anything, prove anything to anyone. I could just read my books as the sun went down. It was bliss.

A few times my mother made iced chocolate in a pink flask that I would take out to the garden with me.

That old secondhand camping tent is probably the closest thing I’ll have to my mother’s aura being out here in Singapore now so I hope very much to have a little tent of my own in the next place I live in. I wish in many ways, to return to a time where decisions and responsibilities were not of my concern, to a time when it was just the four of us in one house and even bigger backyard surrounded by gum trees. To this day, it boggles my mind that people can stay in the one place their entire lives, their root systems so deep in. I’ve lived in a total of fourteen homes in my life. I have moved fourteen times. And that’s excluding the friends whose couches I slept on when I first moved to this city. I am, in many ways, a nomad with a travelling caravan of wild and wonderful curios and ideas collected over the years. So while being a highly adaptable species, all I can say now is: I need my tent, I can’t explain it, and I will be ordering mine from Etsy in the next place I call home.

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