Finding Home

     "Because home, family, and love are always familiar."      Reading La Maison Punjab 's backstory gives depth to my personal experience of the place that I can only describe as a space of intimacy, one where real conversations transpire enveloped in a gastronomical experience that is nourishment to the visual, tactile, olfactory and of course gustatory sense. Traveling 100 kilometers from my home in Ormoc to Tacloban City to take part in the offering Chef Sandeep and Chef Yan extends is a journey that is certainly worthwhile.       We spend our whole lives trying to find home in people, places, experiences, and yes, food. Our definition of home shifts and transforms through the different timelines of our lives. I read recently Derek Walcott's Love After Love. Essentially it reminds us how most if not all of us after a long journey to faraway lands, an exile if you will, return to the place we have abandoned in this quest for meaning. Only to realise that while it

"The time will come when, with elation you will greet yourself arriving at your own door, in your own mirror and each will smile at the other's welcome,"   As I wake earlier than the boys to prepare for the day's necessities, I find myself introspecting on Derek Walcott's words whose meaning have changed over the years in the various seasons that have come to pass in my life.  I prepare the rice and set it on the stove. Then I sit at the kitchen table with my cup of black relishing so much the silence and stillness in our home. It allows my body, mind and heart to ease into the various comings and goings of the day. Thoughts appear though not necessarily interconnected or perhaps they are: I am a mother first. Always. I chose this life. Every departure was, is a choice. Every coming home too. Letting go and forgiveness is a process I have to do many, many times. How do I imbue love, kindness and compassion in all the choices in my life when self-judgment is ever p