When I see the Ten Most Wanted lists … I always have this thought: If we’d made them feel wanted earlier, they wouldn’t be wanted now.
—EDDIE CANTOR
THE WRITER GEORGIA Heard asks, “What is your querencia?”
In Spanish, querencia describes a place where one feels safe, a place from which one’s strength of character is drawn, a place where one feels at home. It comes from the verb quere, which means to desire, to want … quere means the wanting place.
For me, the wanting place is not a place of surface wanting—for clothes or money or a car—but a place of relationship, a place of yearning in which I feel my want to return to the natural element in which my soul breathes. How do we find this place of relationship? How do we stay faithful to this place that feels like home, to which we return to heal? When was the last time you returned there? Do you still know the way?
Under all our burden and joy, this safe, interior space that feels like home is the spot of honest being that we arrive at by being who we are and by inhaling the very aliveness of things, when we risk enough to let that aliveness in.
Another name for this safe, interior space that we all long for is the Original Presence we were born with. Like salmon, we’re drawn to return to our place of birth. For salmon, their place of birth is a physical location. For us, our place of birth is that Original Presence we know so freshly in the center of our being. Because we are so rearranged for being in the world, we have to return, again and again, to that Original Presence to renew our authenticity.
A moment of return happened to me the last time I was in New York City. Up early, I went to sit with the trees in Bryant Park, and I began to cry. I’m not sure why, but this is a place of return for me. I can’t say how, but the bare trees, reminiscent of Paris, always seem to lean toward Eternity. The bare, lighted trees in the middle of this magnificent city give me a scent of the Original Presence I was born with. The thin, bare trees yearning for the light model what we all know—that reaching for the light is all that matters. Sitting in Bryant Park before these trees reminds me of this simple return. Sitting there awakens my need to reach for the light. For all our strategizing and problem-solving, stripping ourselves bare and reaching for what matters will restore us and make us strong enough and tender enough to see our way through.
Because we are so rearranged for being in the world, we have to return, again and again, to that Original Presence to renew our authenticity.