The Visionary Woman Podcast
The Visionary Woman Podcast
Home: An Introspective Journey
What does home truly mean to you? During a pivotal move to Nashville, Tennessee, me and my family found ourselves grappling with this very question. It led us down a road of introspection and self-discovery, culminating in my latest single, 'Home,' with the 318 Collective. Our journey, coupled with the challenging times we've all faced, inspired a heartfelt music exploration of this theme. I delve into our personal story, unraveling the layers of what home symbolizes to us, as well as its broader implications in our collective human experience.
It's undeniable that elements like love, security, culture, and friendships contribute to our sense of home. But what happens when we feel displaced, distant from those we love, or our sense of wellbeing is disrupted? I share with you how I tackled these challenges, and found balance and peace amidst the upheaval. You'll hear me discuss my song 'Home,' its profound message, and how it mirrors my family’s journey. I invite you to join me, connect with my story, and perhaps uncover deeper insights into your own perceptions of home and belonging.
Check out the single on it’s release date 8/18 on all streaming platforms!
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Don't put your dreams to bed. You've done that enough. Now it's time to stir them up. This is your friend and host, Kirstie Fleur, with the Visionary Woman podcast, and I love resourcing the Visionary Woman, the creative, the artist, the business owner, the risk taker, and on this show, we will talk about what it means to get out of your own way and take your dreams to the next level, and we'll be back in the conversation. Welcome to the Visionary Woman podcast. I'm your host, Kirstie Fleur, and I'm excited to be with you guys today and talk to you about our new episode, the title of Home and where we belong, Home. We are excited to announce that we just released our EP with an artist collective that I'm a part of, called the 318 Collective. So if you haven't heard of 318 Collective, it's a Nashville creative group for thought leaders, creatives, visionaries, influencers here in Nashville, Tennessee, but you're going to want to check that out.
Kirstie:Anyway, this song is called Home, and I'm going to delve into what it means to be home. What does it mean? Especially in the times that we've been in, as of 2020 and these past few years, we felt like that displacement, of what it feels like to be disconnected from home, what it feels like to be disconnected from each other, where we got to pull apart a little bit and maybe for a little bit it felt good because we got to refresh and we weren't connected to all of the rigor of going to games and events and all the things. But then after a while you settled and realized wait, we need each other, we need to be back connected, we need to be back centered. But those moments gave us an opportunity to also lean in and see how much we need to figure out where our internal home is and how we get connected. So I feel like that's a lot of what the song is about. So that song is already out and it's already released. So wherever you go and listen to music at, it is called "Home and you can type in Home Curiosity Floor or Home through an, a Collective to find that song.
Kirstie:So I'll start by just introducing you guys to my personal life and how we ended up moving to Nashville, Tennessee. The exciting thing for us was we were in Louisiana. We were actually in the middle it wasn't the middle, the beginning of COVID and we had already known for a year before COVID happened that we were moving to Nashville, Tennessee. We told our family, we told all our friends and everybody hey, we're moving to Nashville, just giving you guys a heads up, so you have some time and you know that we're moving. Still, nobody was prepared for our big announcement that we're leaving Louisiana to move to Nashville, Tennessee.
Kirstie:So we moved here. We really didn't have a plan. It wasn't like we're moving here for music or we're moving here my husband does construction, we're contracting, we're moving here for those things, but it just so happened. It's the perfect place for both of those things. If you know the dynamic of what's happening in Nashville, there's a ton of building, a lot of people are moving here. So it's great for his work. It's great for what I do as an artist and singer-songwriter as well.
Kirstie:But we came here on a nudge. We just felt like we were supposed to be in Nashville. We felt like God was telling us to come to Nashville and this is where we needed to be building and doing life in community. And so we jumped on it and that's what we did. So, however, when we were like, yeah, we're going to do it, made the decision to do it, we had no idea we made the decision before COVID, so we didn't know that that was going to happen. Nobody could of really been prepared for that.
Kirstie:But in the middle of that we got sick. Both of us got COVID and we're at the house and our parents are like, surely you guys are not going to leave now, like you just got COVID, you just recovered from it. But in that process we already, our house was being packed up and they were like you guys are a week out from being sick with COVID and you're going to pack up and move to Nashville. We're like, we are sold. We know that we're moving, so we're getting out of here. We already had tenants lined up for our place back home in Louisiana and we had already had a place lined up here in Nashville, so we just went for it. So we put a five bedroom house into storage, well not at first.
Kirstie:At first, actually, at first we brought a five bedroom house with us to a two bedroom apartment and I don't know what we were thinking. I guess we thought we were about to move all that stuff into the apartment. No, so we ended up taking all that stuff to a U-Haul, to a storage or whatever, and it was set there for like what? Two and a half years before we ever saw any of this stuff again, and so it's been a journey of like transitioning and being here and feeling what is home. But we've had and I wish my husband was on this podcast today so he could talk about this with me, but we've had these two and a half years, the first two and a half years here in Nashville.
Kirstie:We've had this time to like really heal and rest and recenter and focus on what our home is individually. Even though we're married, we are individual people. So what is home to us individually, what is home to us together as a family, and what are we building? We don't want to work our lives away and then we don't have time for each other and then have time for our own self, our own rest, our own personal Sabbaths or leisure or luxury or whatever those things are, and so, anyway, we've spent a lot of time leaning into that and this song really came from that place, like what is home? And so, if you listen to the lyrics of the song, the song is like I remember dinners on the table, hearing all the children playing, and for me that was a reflection of my childhood being at my grandmother's house. All the kids are outside playing and laughing and the adults are inside the house eating and doing all the things that they're doing and it just. You know, you would have arguments, you fuss, you fight. You know, you make up, you get back together. This was just like the fabric of what family was.
Kirstie:And then what I was realizing is I felt that this connection and that fracture from what family actually felt like from when I was a kid, you know, and then I was looking at what me and my husband were cultivating and I'm like gosh, we're so busy doing things, like we're so busy doing, and so we're both working, we're doing like at the time we were doing like official ministry stuff, worship leading, my husband like just a lot of stuff, even though we were like connected with our kid and doing those things. We just spent so much time doing that to when we looked up and I'm like my health is in a bad place, you know there's. You know you start reaping the, you know really the reward or the, you know you start seeing what happens from a life of just being really run down, from doing, doing, doing, doing and never like taking time to really rest, really reset or really reconnect your soul to what it is, what you're doing, and so that's what this song is about. I feel like everybody can connect with that and resonate with that place of just you know doing before, being like, being present, you know.
Kirstie:And then there's this centeredness around home, like a home is just a place where you can. It's a space where you can fail forward. You know like there's safety there. So there's this, you can have this privacy of intimacy at home, because at home you, you're able to have, your confidence is kept. You know there's privacy and you know, when you're building a home, you know it feels like the journey of a thousand miles, but it really is like one foot in front of the other, but over time it feels like this process of where you're, you're actually feel like you're riding a bike, because it's like these are the rhythms of what home is, even if something new comes up. There's safety. You know there's a rootedness in home and so, yeah, when we were at the songwriting camp where this song was written at, so crazy.
Kirstie:So it was three of us in the writing room me, Michael and a guy named Darnell who were writing together. One of us had never written before, one of us a musician, and then me. I write quite often, so it was interesting dynamic. We had three different perspectives on what home was. We both had completely different upbringings and so our, our definitions of home looked completely different. One of the guys, the depiction of home was like you know this, you know, always watching, watching football with his family and with his dad, and it was safe. He had a two parent household, you know it. There just was never that real terminal, terminal or friction there. He always felt like he could have a safe place to go to, a safe home environment and then really similar with the other guy, well, like this safety there, like this protection, you know, playing the piano with his, you know, with his family and all those different types of things, just a beautiful home environment. And then mine was more of a friction where home didn't always feel like a place of safety. It felt like a place of chaos and confusion and frustration and trying to be centered, not knowing how to find my footing and so all of these things.
Kirstie:And we're writing this song and putting it together, what is home for all of us? What you know? How does this, how can we find a centeredness in what home is? And so we came back to it and we're like we may not all have the same definition of what home is. You might hear the song and be like you know we always have. We've never not had dinners at the table, you know, it's never felt like this. So you might be like man. We're in reminisce on man. I remember when it was like this and I missed this and I want this too. But something that we can all agree on is human flourishing and human well-being and what we actually need to feel safe and secure and settled in a place and these are psychological things too. These are not just, you know, some ethereal things that are just thrown out there, but for the sake of what it means to have a home and to feel that connectedness, some of the things that I wrote down that we need to feel like we have home and that we feel like that we have that human flourishing are the rest, the ease, the shelter, refuge, security, safety, asylum, retreat, comfort, a place to be nursed. You've heard like a nursing home. I thought about that. I was like, wow, it's called a nursing home. But in home you feel like you can be nursed. You know, break something, your wounds are healed or covered, you know, by your parents or your family, friends, whoever's there with you, so a place to be nursed, ownership or endowment, family. You have that locale like a place that you can return to acceptance, belonging, enjoyment, privacy, vault, peace, roots.
Kirstie:Another thing my husband actually brought this one to my attention. He was like the taste and the sounds and the sight. So the culture of what home is, that love, that intimacy, friendships, connections, esteem, self-actualization, meaning, like you know, in your home or in this safe place, you're aware of your potentialities, like what you can do, like you know what potentials you have, and all those things and the people around you are aware of those things as well. Nourishment are like the basic things food place and then like social bonds. So those are the things that we need, that are really pretty basic as far as human flourishing and what a home means. And you may have had some of these but not have had all of these, but these are the things that we now get to cultivate, that we now get to go back and get. It's like now I get to go back and find these things and then I have like what I feel like is a simple measure, for if a place is a place I can call home, even a people, because we to each other, we are home. So, even as a people I'm like do these people?
Kirstie:Sometimes you can be around people you know and they just feel like home. You're like man, I don't know what it is, they just feel like family, they just feel like home and you connect immediately, you know and you do life and you do time together and you realize what those things are that actually make you feel like those people feel like home. And it could be some of these things like man, I have enjoyment when I'm around them. Man like the culture, like maybe they're from Louisiana, they get the taste, the sounds, the sights, the language, like, we talk fast, a little bit country, a little bit, you know, like swamp. So things like that, like people you know, get your culture and get the things. You're not having to constantly explain yourself but you can just lean in and just be yourself. Those are pieces of home.
Kirstie:But, like a simple metric or simple formula that I like to use is, do I feel accepted in this place, with these people, whatever this environment is? Do I feel accepted? Another thing is, do I feel protected, known, connected? You'll hear that in the song protected, connected and known. Those are some of the things like connection and feeling known. They do take time. In connection with community, you gotta take time to get to know people. Knowing is a process, but do I feel like I can actually be myself and be known in this environment? Another thing is, can I make deep connections? Is this a place where I'm gonna have to be on the surface? Because if it is, it's a no for me. I can't just come in here and bring a piece of myself. I gotta be able to fully show up as who I am. That feels like home.
Kirstie:Another thing is, is it built on honesty? Can we have real conversations? Can we disagree? Can we agree to disagree? Are you not going to push your belief systems in your things? Now you're not gonna like me because I think this way and you think that way. So can we have mature growth in conversations and community? Is it built on honesty? The other thing is do I feel a sense of ownership there, like I love within the artist community that we have here in Nashville, through an collective people that are connected and around us they say okay, so we can do this.
Kirstie:Okay, so what if we do this next? And what if we write this kind of document? And what if we do this? Because they know that it's not about us, it's not a Kirstie and a Chauncy thing, but it is about what we can do, what we can all bring to the table. That is what home is about. That's the really there, the huge piece, the pieces of home right there and, like I said, also just realizing that we have pulled so far away from what a centeredness and what family could be and should be for our personal family, that we were like we can't keep building businesses, because me and my husband are both entrepreneurs and it's what we do. We build business. And so like we can't keep building business and not focusing on us individually, our health and wellness individually, our family's health and wellness individually.
Kirstie:How do we get back to that? And I honestly believe that the whole world needs to get back to that. You know there's a lot of crazy stuff happening with COVID, but also there's some takeaways or some things we can take away from it. Like we got too busy, we got too in a rat race. You know we really need to cultivate rest and ease and enjoyment. You know we're not going to not be able to work. We live in the world, we're humans and we have to work, to eat, to live, but we need to also be able to cultivate that sense of home and that peace and that enjoyment.
Kirstie:And you know, you may be a person that's orphaned or didn't grow up with a mother or father, different situations. I resonate with some of those places. But you know, I know that my thing is I can be around people and build a sense of safety, build a sense of family, build a sense of community with those people from what I didn't have. And so that's our hope for the song. I mean, it's a three minute song, so you're not going to get all of this in the song, but you're getting all this here. So, but I did want to let you hear kind of, like a song story and what this song actually means while you're out there and you're listening to it and you are putting your own definitions and your own things on it, as I hope you do, because as an artist, I don't really want to define a song for people, but I really want you to hear it and resonate with it and see how it lands, see how, how we say, how it hits with you, so let us know how that's hitting. But anyway, we're excited and I want you guys to go everywhere that you listen to your music whether that's Amazon, Spotify, Apple and go and check out "Home and tell us what you think about it.
Kirstie:Thanks again, thanks for listening and joining the conversation today here on the Visionary Woman Podcast. If you enjoyed this episode and would like to join our growing community, the FF Social Club, please comment, like and subscribe so that you can be updated on our upcoming episodes and more happening over at FreedomFleur. com. To catch the latest from me and to access amazing resources for visionaries just like yourself, please visit me on the web at www. kirstiefleur. com. Thanks again for hanging out with me and I'll see you next time. Until then, don't forget to be visionary.