Finally after a decade of travelling the world and healing, and a previous decade running away from everything..... I returned to Newark-on-Trent.
It felt time... somehow, to return. I wanted to be close to my grandma and it just happened very naturally. Over the past 2 decades I had come back religiously -- to visit family, to rest and recharge. Either dropping off bags, or collecting my van.... Newark was my pit stop and ultimately my home.
I had ran from and even resented my home town and country for so long. Seeing it as to blame for many of my problems. Cringing at its collective shadow that ran deep in my bones...
The more I returned the more I healed and became stronger. I used to get so triggered by walking even through the market place -- past the gobby kids, and the brutal memories of what went off here in my youth.
I didn't really realise that this could be something so much bigger, I just thought it was my own problem. That I needed to heal, that I needed to visit family. I never saw myself living here again, and I never saw myself loving it !!
Newark has a hard history -- being a trade port on the River Trent and in the centre of England - it was a place where people came for new work, hence the name. The town was built around a castle and market which lay inside the old castle walls. The suburbs we grew up in lay on land that was beyond the castle boundaries, where they once would throw out the robbers theives and murderers. There was even talk of a leper colony that lay beyond the walls.
The land holds memories, and trauma lasts generations carried through bloodlines. Who knew how much this hard history still affected the town today, but it was a pretty unique place. The culture was heavily influenced by travellers and we spoke with a lot of that old Romany lingo.
Since the world wars last century -- there were council estates built from what was originally army camps. A place where the soldiers returned to, post war and built they lives. They were very hard places with much poverty back in the day, and the energy still felt very stale and old in places.
Ghosts riddled the town so we are told, with friends having encountered experiences first hand.
Talk of witches drowned in the river and plagued bodies dumped..... there was a lot of history here, and I am super sensitive to energy.
So returning here was crazy.... yet it felt right. I somehow knew that I had work to do here... new work, not just slum on beaches or battle for attension in London. But bring my work here, to the midlands, to the old mining lands and hard middle England. If anywhere needed it, it was here.
Maybe we are born in specific places for a reason.
Maybe we are always meant to return.