It has been a month and a half since we’ve moved, off the top of my favorite mountain, to a small beach town nearby. It’s not bad, but it’s at sea-level and somehow still dry. I did not take it well, and only now I can express anything about this with a healthy and minimum level of dispassion.

Not everything around the circumstances of the move went as I had hoped and the details, which I will spare, made me want the mountain as if it were my only source of breath. Not just the landmass, but the entirety of its airspace, its physical and energetic field, down to the sunlight on grass, shadows landing on moss, humidity and salt in the air.

Here’s the hypocrisy: no one did this to me. The move was planned (by people including me) and then to me was truly and repulsively unwelcome when it came to the reality of it, which I appreciate is not logical (though feeling at home never is).

The move made immense logistical sense when it was purely theoretical, and in the name of practicality we planned to move off of the mountain for some time – though only now it occurs to me that people who are delighted to live on a mountaintop as much as I do are likely not driven primarily by logistical ease. To be unpractical by nature is a predisposition to endure inconvenience in the name of greater gifts.

By the time the reality of the move actually happened, the practical meant nothing to me, and I discarded every logic that was a part of the reasons we thought to leave in the first place. I became all sensibility and no sense.

Now the move is six weeks behind me. When I see this mountain homeplace from my vantage point below, the landmass is like a magnet, pulling my car onto that single-lane curving road that climbs up the mountain like a vine, taking me home.

I am drawn back to the mountain from any and all angles no matter what – the wind, the cloud that sits atop it, the fog, thick as if whipped into cream, the rain so strong it falls slant into your eyes, heavy enough to soak the inside of your car in the briefest opening of a door – none of these detract from this place. I take these on with an unconditional love that is not constitutionally native.

I think of this mountain with a recurrence similar to that with which I have written on the subject of home, which is regularly and repeatedly for decades. Revisiting this subject, and the mountain, from different angles and perspectives is an instinct akin to that of a turtle drawn to its shoreline of birth: come back to this. This is a feeling more than a thought.

Because I have never lived anywhere for all that long, this personal point of eccentricity is equal parts curious and predictable.

This past April, I was visiting a place that is another form of home, maybe the ultimate form, a home not by birth but via residence of spirit. This has been the only consistent place to which I’ve returned for the entirety of my life save for pandemic years. I go as much as I can and am compelled to do so from very far away and no matter what.

On this island that is my spirit home, there is a beach that happens to be a home for turtles with similar inclinations. The turtles arrive from the enormity of the Atlantic ocean and make their way into a channel that becomes a sound. The Atlantic is dark and windy by comparison to the channel, and by the time it disembarks into sound, the water has taken on the quality of a warm turquoise bath, with clear sight to the bottom on most days. On either side of the water, you’ll find land, the space between the shorelines of two islands.

In this water live silver bonefish that dart across faster than you can actually notice. Also, very small crabs the color of dough that disappear into sand, starfish, sting rays, small sharks, jellyfish, a rarely-sighted barracuda, and sea turtles.

There were hundreds of turtles swimming in this water when I last visited. They swam in close succession towards the mangroved waters between the two islands, in a line, with orderly distance between them, as if trying to prove nature is not necessarily chaotic.

The way to see them was to sit by the shore and keep eyes towards the Atlantic end of the sound, and keep looking in a relatively fixed place. Up popped a turtle, coming out for air. This happened unpredictably, over and over.

I went for a kayak ride and because the tide was low and also why not, I went further from shore than the place to which I normally swim. The beach came into new perspective. Suddenly the sound shallowed in the middle, something I’d never seen like this. I jumped out of the boat into a nursery of turtles, hundreds lounging on the sand beneath my feet.

I imagined they’d all come here to lay eggs, or that maybe some were newly hatched, coming from Florida, from neighboring Caribbean islands, from Costa Rica, maybe Mexico even, because green sea turtles swim this far, and to watch them swim in large groups is to understand what it is to move with an inner compass that is not explicit, but bodily, magnetic, as if fueled by devotion.

They missed their home, I told myself as I swam next to the turtles, convinced that if I had a spirit home, I also had a spirit animal with whom I shared a geomagnetically imprinted signature. (Remember? I am mostly sensibility over sense?)

Wrong, I learned when I researched turtles for this piece. Turtles do swim thousands of miles to lay their eggs on their birth beach. They do use an inner compass, imprinted at birth, and also, they use sounds, ocean current and markers in sky. But, they don’t always search for their birth beach. Homing can also mean finding a new shore nearby, such that a turtle’s ‘going home’ to nest is discovering a new place.

Finding home in new places, like this, can be an act of resilience, the practice of feeling a place more than finding it.

To consider home is equal parts opposite things. It is to know a place natively, though its contours will move. Home isn’t static – because neither are you. To revisit home is to know a familiar place as different each time – different tides, a shoreline changed by heavy rain, a dock blown away by a tropical storm, new shade cast by palm trees.

Homing is returning to a place that asks to be known anew. It will be familiar, but changed, and somehow smell the same. It will call on your instincts – come here – a call you answer without knowing where it comes from.

I consider the turtles that ‘go home’ to an unknown place and realize this is what I’ve been doing all along in the iterative remakes of life somewhere new.

A friend graciously listened to me complain about moving down the mountain, and reminded me how much I hated the mountain when I first landed there. It felt like a prison of sorts to someone who was at the time accustomed to city rhythms. Also, I arrived during and because of the pandemic under which few people were inhabiting their bodies and homes in recognizable ways.

I pause to note the prison-place was not a prison at all, but a manifestation of extreme privilege that is still uncomfortable to address, but it was the circumstance of the move to this place and not the place itself that made the mountain into a prison.

No one “lives in a country,” Anne Boyer writes, “but everyone lives in a texture,” and this is the best way I have to understand home: a surface, a grain, a fabric. These are unique and also transposable and things that are felt more than kept.

Leaving home and the longing that follows is not about the kitchen cabinets or where to find the scissors, and probably even not about the humidity-level (though I do have a strong preference for rainforest-style locations). The longing has something to do with the narrative that home will and should and does reside exactly here, on this exact patch of sand.

I keep its texture with me. Wind that will blow away trees, salt in the air and ocean roar in the early mornings, humidity that will destroy everything it touches, reminding you our lives are no more and no less than this, everything and nothing.

The predilection for this wild place is my natural habitat even more than the habitat itself, to which I am still drawn without choice in the matter. “How to leave what cannot be left,” Boyer concludes in her essay Like everyone who tries to leave forever. And because this wilderness cannot be left, I follow its electromagnetic pull, from this shoreline far away, in sight of the moving contours of the shoreline of home, still hoping to swim back.