Jet lag, coffee, and I'm back from Japan.

It took a trip halfway around the world to find... nothing.

I’m freshly back in Colorado after spending a few weeks snowboarding and taking photos in Japan. What a sentence. Fifteen-year-old me would lose her shit if she read that. I like little moments of perspective like that, a gift we can give ourselves whenever we want.

Anyway, I’m currently drinking too much coffee and riding out the last fumes of jet lag. I’m 7 pounds lighter after 14 days of snowboarding and backcountry touring and eating whatever sad form of vegetarian food I could find. 

Other than that, I’m exactly the same.

It’s funny. I went to Japan hoping for a great epiphany, a transformational reckoning, internal growth, something. 

Anything. 

All I found was “sameness.” 

It took 3 flights, 31 hours of travel, and lugging 160 lbs. of snowboard gear into 7 different elevators for me to realize that even on the other side of the world, all I could see was similitude.

I don’t speak Japanese. I can’t read food menus at a restaurant or directions on street signs. During most of my interactions with the general public, I felt too loud/too tall/ too strong/too vegetarian and also not delicate enough/not polite enough/not subdued enough. Never in my life have I felt the paradox of being too much and not enough all at once while also feeling… comfortable. 

Everywhere I looked– despite language barriers and a general confusion around how to use toilets in Japan– I found “home.” 

Home is everywhere. While snowboarding through unimaginably deep powder, I learned that “Woooo!” is universal, that laughter transcends nuance, and that gloved peace signs thrown to each other on skin tracks mean “hey, we are the same” even though we can’t exchange words to explain it.

No epiphanies. No reckoning. Just community.

I found it on the other side of the world, hidden in the smile lines around the eyes of old Japanese men at the top of a mountain, the curiosity of foxes in the trailhead parking lot where I was brushing my teeth next to the van where I slept, or the shy nod of other also naked women entering the same Japanese hot spring (called onsen) as me. 

Animals. Terrain. The inherent goodness of people.

I was clearly a tall, kinda blonde-haired outsider with a hot pink beanie and an affinity for driving on the right side of the road, but despite the never-ending differences, all I could see was “sameness.” I was the same, too (other than being more useful than usual on a plane to reach overhead luggage for strangers).

On our last morning in Furano, during a very cold morning in the backcountry, I started feeling through my disappointment in the lack of a big epiphany. I don’t know what I had wanted to find, but I was bummed to have found… nothing. I had a great time, but there was no big takeaway, no bigger meaning, just a lot of fun riding powder with my friends. It seemed so normal, so anticlimactic. I reconciled it with the understanding that this feeling of normalcy was actually a result of the deep knowing that I am at home within myself. I know myself. I trust myself. I am not always graceful, but I always have it, whatever it is. 

Even in places I’ve never been, I’m always home.

I think “home” is wily, like a fox.

Home is more than a place. Home has a better sense of humor than that. 

It hides in places you’d never expect to find it. 

I think I first found it in Fort Collins, CO when I was a little kid. I felt safe riding my bike, having lemonade stands, and wearing shorts to cold soccer games well into October. I believed in trees, dogs, and saving the rainforest. I had a crush on Shawn from Boy Meets World, and my friends were middle-class kids with trampolines, department store bikes, and Lisa Frank folders. It was here that I learned people are inherently well-intended. Thanks to this section of my life, I find “home” every single time I hop on my bike and feel the connectedness of childhood.

I found home in Crested Butte, after college. I was twenty-one, and it was here I discovered the secret world of men. It was mesmerizing, intoxicating even. I learned the power of doing, of showing up, of pointing, stomping, owning. I was almost always the youngest in the room and usually the only woman. I found home in the underbelly of ski town bars, in the strange bond of inside jokes while working on an asphalt crew, and at the tops of the gnarliest peaks I could drag myself up. I learned how to find home in figuring shit out and using my body as much as my brain.

During my time living in Utah, I discovered home in the “and.” I could have a career AND snowboard. I could be in nature AND a city. Salt Lake is the land of and, so I learned how to find home in paradox, to be comfortable with things that don’t make sense even though they do. This is one of my coziest homes these days. I like living in the space of “and.” 

The version of home I found in Montana, for a decade, was roots. I crashed my bike on them constantly. I hung out with friends whose families had been in Montana for four or five generations. They invited me to their family Christmas parties and I would watch what roots looked like when they made secret recipes and had giant bonfires in the woods together. I even rooted. I built a very successful business. I lived in the woods and found home in the act of rooting as deeply into my internal world as I could, surrounded by the most rooted ecosystem that I grew to understand we are all part of. Home is inside of all of us.

I don’t know if people are shaped by place or if places are what shape people. Probably both.

I do know, however, that people and places and feelings change. 

They’re supposed to. 

And even when things change, home is something we carry with us. 

Home hides in the boredom of strangers in the same long line at the post office. You can find it in the sadness of heartbreak or in the steadfastness of Frank D. Azar billboards across Colorado. Home is mirrored in the eyes of the guy who has worked at the same Thai restaurant as long as you can remember. Or the smell of Greeley in the wind. It hides in the palpable anticipation of chairlift lines, the words of a song you haven’t heard for a decade but can still sing, and even in the most remote trailheads of Japan where foxes want your sandwich.

Happy to be home, jet lag and all.

Here for it,

Lisa

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