Flying south to come home

The year my mother's house became the place I visit

I am writing this from my mother’s house on Long Island. My parents moved here more than 20 years ago to a town I never lived in as a child, and it is the house they were in when my father passed away in 2011, and where my mother has lived on her own since. What feels familiar comes from two decades of returning rather than from growing up: the annual summer visit with its own worn shape, the same drive from the airport, the same table, the same faces of family who gather when I come. For a long time, I thought of this as simply going back east, the place my people are. This year, I noticed that something in how I hold it has shifted.

When I think about the flight back to Querétaro on the eleventh, the word that arrives is home. It points past the house behind me, warm as it is, and past the country that issued my passport, to the place in México where my days have found their rhythm and where I have built a life that fits the person I actually am. Long Island has become the place I visit. Querétaro has become the place I return to. The direction of home has reversed, and it became real to me only while I was standing inside the old one.

There is a moment in every version of the hero’s journey that gets less attention than the departure. The leaving is dramatic. Someone hears a call, refuses it, and finally crosses into the unknown world, into the trials that change them. What Joseph Campbell called the return is harder to picture, because on the surface, it looks like going back to where you started. The traveler comes home carrying something they did not have before, and the old world receives them as a different person, because they are one. The return completes the journey rather than undoing it. It is the final stage, not a retreat from the adventure but the point of it.

I have been thinking about that while I sit in these familiar rooms. I love this place and the people in it, and I also understand, in a way I could not have before I left, that I no longer live here in the deeper sense. That understanding arrives as a completion rather than a loss. James Hollis writes often about the difference between the life we inherit and the life we choose, and about how much of the first half of life is spent living out a script handed to us by family, culture, and circumstance. The second half, when we are willing, becomes the slow work of authoring something truer. Leaving for México at the end of 2024 was part of that authoring, and coming back each year to feel myself lean toward the life I built rather than the one I was given is how I know the authoring took.

The love here is real, and the roots are real, and that stays true no matter which way home now points. What has changed is that the roots no longer decide where I stand. I can sit at my mother’s table, grateful for every year I still get to share it, and feel my whole self leaning toward a return flight, and hold both of those truths at once. For a long time, I would have read that leaning as disloyalty. I recognize it now as alignment, the simple fact of a life that has found its center and knows where the center is.

Most of us carry some version of this, even those who never move countries. There is the home we come from and the home we are making, and they are rarely the same place. Sometimes the second home is geographic. More often, it is a marriage, a vocation, a friendship, a way of living that we chose rather than inherited, and the truest test of whether we have claimed it is what we feel when we stand back inside the first one. Do the familiar rooms pull us into the person we used to be, or do we find ourselves, with love and without apology, ready to go home to the life we made? This passage from the inherited life to the chosen one sits at the center of A Life Aligned, if the question speaks to you and you want to follow it further.

So this is where I find myself as the visit winds down and the return ticket waits. I love both places. The real question underneath the visit is which one is home, and I have finally landed on the answer. On the eleventh, I will hug my mother at the door, make the drive to the airport I have made so many times, and fly south toward the life I have chosen, carrying this place and these people with me the way you carry the ground you came from.

If you are living somewhere between the home you came from and the home you are making, I would be glad to hear where you find yourself in it.

— Mark

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A Life Aligned is a companion to these letters, a depth-psychological guide for anyone in the middle of a meaningful transition. It is available in paperback, as an eBook across Amazon, Apple Books, Barnes & Noble, Kobo, and other platforms, and as an audiobook.

Mark Arcuri is a psychology professional, integrative health & wellness coach, educator, and author living in Querétaro, México, where he is Associate Dean of the BS Integrative Health program at Walden University and maintains a private practice.

If this letter resonated, consider sharing it with someone who might be standing between two homes of their own.