Solbeam on community and defining “home”

This post, written by Sol of Solbeam, a long-time blogger/backpacker (and so much more) resonated deep with me, as her posts often do. I started reading her blog in 2005 and spent hours reading through her archives of adventures and insight.

 

Her travels have been inspired by the Paulo Coehlo book, The Alchemist, in which a shepard goes on a journey to realize his Personal Legend and in the end, finds himself where he began. In her post she answers what “home” means to her after seven years of traveling and how travel has transformed her image of the world and herself. 

 

 

And that is perhaps when the big “C” word entered my mind and vocabulary. I decided that I did not care WHERE in the world I lived, so long as I was surrounded by people with whom I shared like values, trust, mission, curiosity and intentions; Community. One in which I could foster my new understanding of the concepts of interconnectedness and interdependence. A place and people in whom I could invest and connect. For just as I, in my perpetual pilgrimage had learned that my travels were less about the goal than the journey. SO had I learned that my relationships were less about the people, than my interactions with them. And I needed a circle. Of brothers and sisters and parents and lovers and extended family and community with whom I could exchange: trust, teachings, experience, dependence, beliefs, challenges, support and, of course, love.

Read the full post here. Solbeam has been blogging about her travels for the past seven years since leaving a well paid job for a one-way plane ticket to pursue her own “personal legend”. Her writing is poetic, insightful and inspiring, as are her photographs. Her posts are also organized by topic and region so dive in for some beautiful words of wisdom and be prepared to be inspired.