• 

The boys have been begging to listen (and re-listen…and re-listen) to the Moana soundtrack lately in the school-bound car, and a couple of verses into “How Far I’ll Go” always leads to a beautiful moment–the lyrics “I’ll be satisfied if I play along/But the voice inside sings a different song/What is wrong with me?” are belted out, and our chorus of three responds with a resounding, “NOTHING!”

This started after I felt the need to answer her question myself, to the boys, by emphasising that if Moana hadn’t been different from everyone around her, then she wouldn’t have been called to the sea and she wouldn’t have saved their island. Our ventures around here may be a bit less heroic and and epic, but it’s important to me nonetheless that my kids grow up knowing how beautiful, and important, and not-wrong, different can be–and not just in movies.

Because I grew up feeling different. Different from others, and even within myself–parts of me competing with each other constantly. The desire to please others, to play by the rules, to get everything right, pitted against an anger at those I wanted to please, an urgency to rebel, to escape. All of it leading to an identity crisis that sent me to New York, in what would become a life theme: all that breaks me is actually remaking me.

I guess we’re having a bit of a Lin-Manuel Mirenaissance around here, because in addition to listening to Moana, the four of us went with friends to see Hamilton onstage over the weekend, and the next day I went with a friend to watch In the Heights. I can’t think about it, especially the “Finale,” without crying.

There’s a breeze off the Hudson
And just when
You think you’re sick of living here the memory floods in
The morning light, off the fire escapes

From inside an Australian cinema, I was transported to New York City, a place where I was reborn at twenty-seven. And I–achingly, desperately–missed it. But then–

But I ain’t goin’ back because I’m telling your story
And I can say goodbye to you smilin’, I found my island
I been on it this whole time
I’m home!

I thought about how often Little Brother has said it, after his first term’s focus on Australia, that it’s a continent that’s also an island. About how a couple of times now, I’ve landed on islands that have turned into homes. About how I picked a leech off my foot last week and this morning as I ran, a wallaby bounded across the road ahead of me. All the beautiful insanity I never had the will or imagination to conceive that has nonetheless been a part of my story because grace hasn’t, won’t, let me go.

I grew up trying to live only from my left brain, black and white, right and wrong, safety, not knowing that there were stories waiting to be told from the other side–that I wasn’t half a person, or a scattered one, but a whole one waiting to be made whole.

In Wintering, Katherine May writes, “I clear the surface of my desk and make a pool of light with my lamp. I go off to fetch matches and light a candle. One light is steady and sure, the other uncertain and flickering. I open my notebook and work between these two poles. On balance, it’s where I prefer to be: somewhere in the middle. Certainty is a dead space, in which there’s no more room to grow. Wavering is painful. I’m glad to be travelling between the two.”

I am somewhere in the middle, too. In between my right and left brain, my reason and emotion, my logic and creativity. In between the religion of my youth and the mystic faith with fuzzier edges. In between hemispheres and continents and islands, a piece of me in each of these places that somehow adds up not to scattered bits but to a whole, because wherever I am, there grace is, and wherever grace is? Is home.

But with patience and faith
We remain unafraid
I’m home!
You hear that music in the air?
Take the train to the top of the world
And I’m there
I’m home!
We’re home

We’re home

We’re home

Home

We’re home

Home

Home

Home!