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Coming Home to Exhale

An excerpt from the new book Homing: A Quest to Care for Myself and the Earth

Book Cover Homing

We moved to our shy cabin in the woods in the early autumn. The olive oak leaves turned turmeric. The heavy, rented moving truck full of our family of four’s worldly pos­sessions curved with the road and jostled down the steep hill to our hidden valley, surrounded by forest but minutes from a town, and close to a city. A romantic and rousing French song tumbled out of the radio as we drove over the culvert that passes the creek and turned left onto our road. My cells rushed with joy at the sound of the music mixing with the lilting birdsong, which drifted from the treetops through our open windows. The birds welcomed us.

Unfolding myself and my children from the car, I walked around the moving truck and stood in front of the cabin with baby Wren on my hip. I exhaled, as though I’d held my breath for years. Maybe here, in the woods, I might begin the hard, messy work of letting go of guilt and a lifelong, destructive attachment to perfection. Maybe I could stop chastising myself for the weight of a world in crisis. Maybe here I could balance the sorrow of wildfires with the beauty of wildflowers.

Maybe here I could balance the sorrow of wildfires with the beauty of wildflowers.

I inhaled, sipping the exhalations of spruce and red oak and paper birch into my lungs. In conversation with each other, we passed breath between our bodies, my own lungs opening to the aliveness of the trees that made up this northern jungle. One particularly grand pine tree caught my eye, with paint-bristle needles and a soaring, crooked trunk that arced over our house. Two large scars marked the side of her bark, like the two long scars that marked the side of my own left arm — body evidence of that traumatic dance accident that pleaded with me to stop pushing too hard. I hoped the imperfect pine would now take care of me, offering support that I traditionally refused so vehemently, giving me breath through her needles and holding the ground with her thick roots. As my family and I extended our own roots into this gracious geography, the least I could do was learn how to take care of her, too. But I couldn’t quell the uneasy question: How could I possi­bly nurture the Earth when I was struggling to take care of myself?

I moved to find home in the woods—but really, I needed to find home in my own body and self. I needed to find home as a welcome, good, and worthy part of an exuberant Earth.

Living in an overwhelming culture of consumption and extraction, I found myself inflicted with the destructive wounds of human systems that demanded too much pro­ductivity, and with a deeply internalized misconception that my worth came from my performance. I would have to repair what had been damaged in my own self. I would have to start new cycles, ones that take care of, and give back to, the Earth—in my own house, in my own body.

I resolved to learn everything I could about how to live in a way that aligned with nature’s cycles, and to under­stand how that might impact my personal and planetary homes. My curiosity led me to alternative approaches to homebuilding, homemaking, consumerism, farming, food growing, clothing, and the economy. I began an obsession that would last for years, surrounding myself with piles of books, reports, and podcasts, and deciding those would not be enough: I needed to speak with farmers in their fields and homebuilders in their houses. Mine would be an eclectic learning journey rather than a comprehensive one, follow­ing my constellation of interests, with each conversation leading me to new places and people, eventually amount­ing to dozens of interviews with farmers, ranchers, climate activists, designers, economists, scientists, conservationists, and community leaders. I put pressure on myself to know everything, partly because of my earnest nature and partly because I felt deep responsibility on account of my privilege to be living in this home in the woods. 

I moved to find home in the woods—but really, I needed to find home in my own body and self. I needed to find home as a welcome, good, and worthy part of an exuberant Earth.

I would take everything I learned, and change my prac­tices to be a good steward of the Earth. I knew that I wanted to, but I had no idea how. I decided to embark on a journey to find out in the only way I knew how: aiming for perfec­tion, and with headlong obsession.

Excerpted from Homing: A Quest to Care for Myself and the Earth, by Alice Irene Whittaker. ©2024 Published by Freehand Press.

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Book Cover Homing

Learn more about Homing 

A memoir about abandoning an exhausting commuter lifestyle to move to a cabin in the woods, embracing imperfection while cultivating a life of care for self and nature.

Alice Irene Whittaker was addicted to productivity, perfectionism, and discipline. She was used to rushing between multiple jobs, her demanding ballet training, and volunteering for social justice causes, making sure that every single moment of her day was accounted for. But then she finds herself as a new mother, commuting four hours a day into the city and exhausted by the state of the world and paralyzed by climate guilt and anxiety. Something has got to give. Overnight, Alice Irene and her husband decide to retreat to a cabin in the woods, in search of a new kind of life.

Surrounded by creek, meadow, and forest, Alice Irene begins a new lifelong journey of repairing her fractured relationship with both herself and the natural world. Dismantling a history of anorexia, obsessiveness, and workaholism, she decides to stop taking and start caretaking. She asks herself, "How can I take care of the Earth if I don't know how to take care of myself?"

Her quest takes her to meet a renowned economist-rancher in Colorado, to stand at the side of a runway at a sustainable fashion show in Portland, and to witness firsthand rewilding of wolves in Yellowstone. She interviews and learns from dozens of people who are building homes, growing food, making clothes, raising families, and living their lives in regenerative ways.

Braiding together her personal journey with the stories of others who are tending to the Earth, Alice Irene Whittaker has crafted a lyrical, relatable memoir about regeneration and moving from a life of despair to a life of care. Searching for the spaces between the sorrow of wildfires and the beauty of wildflowers, Homing is about returning home to our bodies, geographies, communities, and place, all as a part of nature.

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