Searching Home — poetry book about a spiritual journey of finding “home”
My first book of poetry Searching Home was born, yes born, unintentionally when my notes app started filling up with 20, 30… to more than 80 prose of thoughts, poetically written to describe what I can call an early mid-life crisis before I turned 30.
I have been struggling to pursue my dream as an actress in LA for about 5 years when my life literally started falling apart. A huge breakup, loss of community, car parts being stolen, moving houses constantly, and finally reaching burnout (or more like a meltdown). When my dad was diagnosed with a brain tumor, I decided it was time. It was the end of a domino of the essential parts of my life destroyed: house, car, finance, job, love, and family. I packed everything in a stranger’s garage along with my car, and flew to South Korea to be with my parents with absolutely nothing planned.
I grew up very religious and have been burned by Christianity and the Church over and over, but somehow I always came back to a higher being deep inside me. This was the first time I surrendered everything to “God”. If you’ve experienced total surrender, you’d know it’s pretty much like death. Death of my plan, ego, intelligence, identity, will, power, and future. Facing the painful truth of nothing but the present.
This book deals with a lot of topics, but it was mainly inspired by one of my soulmates (or what I continually come back to understand as my ‘twinflame’). But a true soulmate of course reflects the darkest part of you, shakes your core being, and what this experience revealed was the root of the darkness within me that I have had with me since I was a little girl. I call her the Queen of Death.
I’d love for anyone who reads my book to share their experience with my text, but I can share that it touches upon ontological and spiritual questions of identity, love, death, loss, and soul-searching.
I’ll end with the intro I wrote for this book:
Something good isn’t always good
Something bad isn’t always bad
Good thing then isn’t always good now
Bad thing now isn’t always bad later
Something good for you isn’t always good for me
Something bad for me isn’t always bad for someone else
A good choice isn’t always the best
A bad choice isn’t always that bad
(sometimes it’s better to make bad choices than only good ones)
Some bad choices are detrimental, but even that isn’t the end
Some reach their destination sooner than others
The destination is when you are no longer dreaming,
When you’ve achieved and accomplished,
When you are good
And when you are good,
you’re left with this question:
“Was this the best?”
I stop trying to reach the destination
I made some bad choices
I made some good choices
I lost some things
I gained some things
And then I pause, and think
It wasn’t that bad after all
- Shiona Lee
