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I’ve been thinking a lot over the past while about the concept of ‘home;’ how we put together the places that contain our lives, our families, the stuff that defines us, where we go to be with the ones we love, or where we go to be alone. I think about how we feel about those places we’re told we ‘belong.’ ‘Home,’ for many of us, is an ever-changing thing, whether it’s by choice or by circumstance. Where we live doesn’t always feel like home, and sometimes ‘home’ can be a world away. ‘Home’ for me has always been a complicated thing. There have been many times in my life when I’ve felt displaced, like an uprooted tree that hasn’t yet got a grip in its new soil. And while I have found ‘home’ in unexpected places (alone in Paraguayan apartments, in busy hostels on hidden street corners, in rundown houses in a town I never thought I’d end up in) other times places where I’ve planned to make home have tossed me right back out (I could have been a well-established West-Coast hippie by now....

My daughter Joy is the most ironic toddler because her favourite book is “Sadness,” from a popular children’s movie. We’ve been reading it for weeks and the character’s heavy sighs make my weirdo of a kid smile and giggle. This week, however, she’s been handing me “Fear,” and after a few days of feeling a weird, generalized melancholia, it has finally clicked in that this little genius is handing me my own problem to read out loud every night. So there it is: fear. Of what? Nothing in particular...and everything. I guess when you’ve experienced a worst case scenario- the one without the happy ending— it makes sense that you could come out of that afraid. Afraid of what the future has in store, afraid of what could happen, what may not happen, afraid of being not enough, or of being too much. Of failing, of leaving, of being left. Of change. There are a lot of rabbit holes I work hard to skirt around. But while turning this revelation over in my head I also stumbled across a reflection...

I want to talk about women. Not, this time, about human rights, misogyny, politics, or reproductive rights, as often times (as many of you know) I like to go on very passionately about. But while I proudly maintain my unequivocal desire to smash the patriarchy, right now I want to talk about women in a different context; a different level that is (like many important things that women do) largely overlooked, because women amaze me. Not just those women whose voices have been picked up—often begrudgingly—by the media/history books/general public. Not just those names that many of us now know. I want to talk about the women I know because every day they amaze me more than any celebrity, superhero storyline or epic trilogy plot. They are the heroines of life who often go unacknowledged because their acts of selflessness and bravery become so commonplace that it can be easy to grow accustomed to them, and forget that they are extraordinary.        ...

“The most astounding fact is the knowledge that the atoms that comprise life on earth, the atoms that make up the human body, are traceable to the crucibles that cooked light elements into heavy elements in their core, under extreme temperatures and pressures. These stars, the high mass ones among them, went unstable in their later years. They collapsed and then exploded, scattering their enriched guts across the galaxy. Guts made out of carbon, nitrogen, oxygen and all the fundamental ingredients of life itself…             So that when I look up at the night sky and I know that, yes, we are part of this universe, we are in this universe, but perhaps more important than both of those facts is that the universe is in us. When I reflect on that fact, I look up. Many people feel small because they’re small and the universe is big. But I feel big because my atoms came from those stars.” –Neil deGrasse Tyson    ...

A lot of the time, when people ask me what my degrees are in, they think I dig up artifacts. And so I explain that no, I am not an archaeologist. But let's face it; many people have no idea what a cultural anthropologist does. I do uncover artifacts but they're in stories- the relics of people's lives that I dig up with conversations to create a map of how they got to where they are, where they're going next, how they see themselves, their lives and how they connect to those around them. I think you could understand the whole world through stories; why people choose to do what they do pretty much tells us why the world is they way that it is, no?          Growing up I wanted nothing to do with people. I had a great deal of social anxiety. In high school I decided that I wanted to be a vet. I remember telling a friend that I wanted to work with animals and that people were not at all interesting. She protested, “but people are amazing Heather!” ...