A Literary Prescription for
For leaving the place, the job, or the life you knew, whether you chose to go or not.
Uprooting is rarely as clean as the word “adventure” suggests. It involves grief for what you are leaving even when you wanted to leave it, and a strange, disorienting stretch where you do not yet belong fully to the new place or the old one. The books, poems, and words gathered here are for that in-between, whether you uprooted yourself on purpose or had it done to you.
“People don’t take trips—trips take people.”John Steinbeck, Travels with Charley
Books
Books written by people who left, on purpose or otherwise.
Mayle and his wife trade England for a four-hundred-year-old farmhouse in the Luberon, and his witty, warm account of the first bewildering year covers everything an uprooting actually involves — bureaucracy, bad weather, and the slow business of being accepted by people who were there first.
Mayes buys and restores an abandoned villa in the Tuscan countryside in her own act of deliberate uprooting, and writes about it with the close attention of a poet rather than a tourist. It is as much about learning to belong somewhere new as it is about the renovation itself.
Stewart, a former Genesis drummer, buys a remote farm in Andalusia with almost no relevant experience and considerable optimism. His account is funnier and more self-deprecating than most relocation memoirs, refreshingly honest about how much of uprooting your life is simply muddling through.
Lee’s sweeping novel follows one Korean family uprooted to Japan across four generations, tracing how displacement and the longing for home echo long after the generation that actually left. It is a sobering, beautifully written reminder that uprooting is rarely a one-generation event.
Poetry
Poems for the pull between two places.
“Home Thoughts, from Abroad”
Robert Browning, 1845
Browning wrote this from Italy, a country he loved, momentarily overcome with longing for the England he had left. It captures something true about uprooting that the relocation memoirs rarely admit — that you can be exactly where you chose to be and still ache for where you were.
“Travel”
Edna St. Vincent Millay, 1921
Millay’s speaker is warm and settled where she is, with good friends she values, and still cannot stop listening for the train that would take her somewhere else. It is an honest account of restlessness that has nothing to do with being unhappy where you are.
“Trees”
Joyce Kilmer, 1913
Kilmer’s tree stays exactly where it was planted and is loved precisely for that rootedness, which makes a quietly pointed counterweight to everything else on this page. Sometimes the ache is not to leave, but to be allowed to stay.
Quotes & Prose
For wherever you find yourself next.
I long, as does every human being, to be at home wherever I find myself.
Maya Angelou
Home is not where you live but where they understand you.
Christian Morgenstern
Traveling—it leaves you speechless, then turns you into a storyteller.
Ibn Battuta
A journey is a person in itself; no two are alike.
John Steinbeck, Travels with Charley
You are allowed to grieve a place you chose to leave. Wanting to go and missing what you left are not contradictions.
Georgia Clare
From Georgia
A short practice for sitting with uprooting your life, whenever you need somewhere to land.
New Beginnings Visualisation Meditation
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