Home and roots

I finished If Women Rose Rooted by Sharon Blackie while flying from Australia to the UK, where I grew up, and it helped me reflect on the difference between home and roots. Home is where you feel held, by yourself, your place and your people, but roots run deeper, ancestral and often invisible: they’re the stories we inherit, the land that shaped our lineage, and the truths that live in our bones.

But how can we truly connect to our roots if we can’t connect with ourselves, when survival fragments our identities and the systems we live in disconnect us from land, community and truth?

There’s a scene in the book where a woman boards a train from London to Essex, a journey I happen to know intimately because it’s a line my family has travelled for years. The woman in the story once dreamed of working for Greenpeace but ended up climbing the ladder at a tobacco company.

Sharon writes that “she was living with a hollow heart”, and reading that line felt like staring into a life I might’ve lived if I’d stayed on the path expected of me.

That moment reminded me how easy it is to become who others tell you to be, and how painful it is to lose touch with who you really are.

For a long time I believed I was broken, too sensitive, too non-linear and too unwilling to follow the path of least resistance, but I’ve come to see that it isn’t me. It’s the capitalist, patriarchal, performance-driven systems we’ve inherited, which reward disconnection and call it success.

What saved me was never compliance but listening to the part of me that always knew there was more, and letting the natural world reflect back what truly matters.

Sharon writes, “We have come to believe that we are separate from nature, or more than this, that we are above it.” That belief doesn’t just shape how we treat the environment; it shapes how we treat ourselves, telling us that worth is productivity, rest is laziness and softness is weakness, and disconnecting us from our own rhythm in a way that is utterly unsustainable. Nature doesn’t work like this and neither should we, because we are nature, and when we forget that, we forget ourselves.

I’ve come to feel rooted not in place or identity, but in myself, which no system can touch.

Through a systems lens

Here I step back from the story to look at the system it belongs to, how the same pattern shows up elsewhere, and where it sits in the Coherence Framework.

Belonging is one of the first things a system teaches us to trade. As children we learn, without ever being told, which parts of ourselves keep us inside the family, the class or the playground and which parts put that belonging at risk, and so we adjust. It isn’t weakness but what a nervous system does to stay connected to the people it depends on.

The pattern carries on through every system that follows. Class teaches you which accent, ambitions and appetites are acceptable, and work hands you a ladder and expects you to climb it even when it leads somewhere you would never have chosen, like the woman on the train who wanted to work for Greenpeace and ended up in tobacco. Culture teaches that success means staying on the path and that leaving it is failure, so each system rewards the version of you that fits while the price is paid somewhere much quieter, as a hollow heart.

The interplay worth noticing is between home and roots. Systems can offer a kind of home, a place where you’re accepted for as long as you keep adjusting, but what they rarely offer is roots, the connection to self, land and lineage that doesn’t depend on fitting in. When roots are cut, people cling harder to whatever home they’re given, which makes them far easier to hold in place.

In the Coherence Framework this sits between state and story. The body learns that belonging is conditional, the story that follows, that this is just how life is and you should be grateful, keeps it that way, and structure does the rest by rewarding the people who stay on the expected path and making every other path more expensive.

The shift isn’t to reject home but to grow roots that don’t depend on it, because once you’re rooted in yourself, you can belong to places and people without abandoning who you are to earn your place among them.