This is Not Your Home
By Z Zoccolante

Have you ever had those moments when you remember being someone else, in dreams or deja vu? You feel misplaced in your skin, as though your internal core has lived here before, somewhere else, in another time. This is the feeling of movies that pull back the matrix of our world and till our eyes open to another layer existing here admits us. It’s been here the whole time, but we see it only now.

For a period of my life, I was obsessively curious with my soul going in and out of lifetimes. Since I was a kid I’ve had a fear of drowning even though I’ve always been a fantastic swimmer. In a massage session years ago I was told a story about me where I saw a small lake and I was a teen being drowned by an older man. Are these things real? Do they carry over in the ether pulling at us through tears in the fabric of time?

Does it even matter if we have this life to live, right now?

Many friends, and people I’ve met, tell me stories, memories of things that have taken place, that didn’t happen in this life. I don’t know what happens in the larger scheme of this world but I believe them. I have learned to live with the incongruencies in my life, that two opposite things can exist at the same time, that there may be alternate versions of the truth.

For example, I returned to Christianity, but even then there are a multitude of different experiences that people have after coming back from near death experiences. They vary and leave room for question, even in death. No one really knows which is why faith is a leap we take on our own. What we believe and our relationship to the creator, to Jesus, to God, to the universe, to a higher power is up to us, and what we believe we’ll find in the end. How we language it is entirely our own.

With the election recently I’m seeing a lot of pain in the world, a lot of fear, and how hating each other can’t be the path to peace.

There’s a theory of thought that says that we choose to come here to “earth school,” so to speak. We choose to come here to experience physical reality, like the way an orange tastes or how our heart beats when someone we desire runs a hand along our skin. I think about this theory often because there’s an element to it where we’ve chosen this life, where we’ve signed off on the lessons we’ve agreed to learn. We might have chosen vast love and vast heartbreak but we may not be privy to how they unfold in this life – we may not have choice over that part. But what if we did agree beforehand and came here like taking a trip, excitement in our bellies, our hearts remembering how to beat again.

Yesterday I walk my dog, after the rain. As she leaps and chases a tennis ball through the field I notice the ground covered in four leaf clovers, dewdrops brimming on the tiny leaves. I squat down and run my hands gently along the greens, water droplets bursting against my fingers, slipping into the earth. I pretend I’m in a movie and this is my first day on earth and everything is new, each sensation a wonder. How long has it been in real life since I’ve touched the grass?

What if we came to earth specifically because we missed these things and then when we get here we take it all for granted? What if we get so wrapped up in the stuff of life that we forget the reasons we came, the things we missed. It wasn’t the feeling of money in the bank, the fanciest car in the parking lot, our million-dollar house on the beach. What if we came back here simply to feel the grass, for the warmth of the sun on our skin, for the taste of an orange, for the way our heart beats in our chest?

I was chatting with a gentleman recently who told me that for years he’d climbed the corporate latter only to realize that the latter was against the wrong building.

So I run my hands along the path of green clovers. If we do come back here to do life again I wonder what I’ve chosen to come back for?

Vast love? Vast heartbreak? The feeling of warm, liquid sun on my skin? How I recently felt someone’s laugh in my own chest as my smile brimmed over into the space between us.

My dog rushes over sniffing as though I’d found treasure and she’s missing out. Her tennis ball is drooly, muddy, and wet as I pick it up from the patch of clover and whip it out into the air. This might not be my home but there’s a reason I’m here.

With Love,

Z :)