The Hearth Keeper and the Wanderer

If I had to name the two patterns I meet most often in the women who find their way to Haus Hexe, it would be these two. The Hearth Keeper and the Wanderer. They look like opposites. They are, more often than not, living in the same body.

The Hearth Keeper

She is the one who keeps the fire going. Literally, sometimes, but mostly in every other sense. She knows where the spare batteries are, remembers everyone's birthday and has a pot of soup on before anyone realises they are hungry. Her home is a place people come back to.

At her best, the Hearth Keeper creates belonging. Her gift is continuity. She holds the thread while everyone else runs about.

At her most depleted, she becomes the fire itself: consumed, used up, burning so that others can be warm. She forgets she is allowed to sit by the hearth, not just tend it. You will often find her standing up in her own kitchen, eating toast over the sink.

In the house

A Hearth Keeper's home centres on the kitchen, and the kitchen centres on her. Look for full cupboards, a table that is always laid for more people than live there, and a very comfortable chair in the sitting room that she almost never uses.

The Wanderer

She needs a horizon. She is the one who gets restless in the same place too long, who plans trips she may never take, who keeps a stack of maps and a bag that is always nearly packed. She is curious, brave and easily bored.

At her best, the Wanderer brings the world home. Her gift is perspective. She reminds everyone that there is more out there than this.

At her most depleted, she is simply running. Not towards anything, just away. She cannot settle, cannot commit to a room, a place, a life, because stillness feels like being trapped.

In the house

A Wanderer's home often looks unfinished, as if she might leave any minute. Boxes not quite unpacked. Pictures leaning against the wall instead of hanging on it. A favourite spot by the window, or on the doorstep, where she can see out.

The Hearth Keeper asks: who will keep the fire going if I leave? The Wanderer asks: who will I become if I stay?

When both live in you

This is the part that matters. Very few women are purely one or the other. Most of us carry both, and they take turns, or argue, or simply exhaust each other.

You might recognise the pattern. You build a warm and beautiful home, then feel suffocated by it. You book the trip of a lifetime, then spend half of it worrying about the house plants. You long for roots and wings at the same time and feel guilty about wanting either.

The answer is not to choose. It is to give each of them a place.

Making room for both

Here are a few things I often suggest, in the house and beyond it.

• Give the Wanderer a window. One place in the house that faces out: a chair by the glass, a bench by the gate, a map on the wall. Somewhere she can look at the horizon without having to leave.
• Give the Hearth Keeper a seat. Not a job. A seat. One chair by the fire, or the stove, or the kettle, that is hers to sit in and rest, and nobody else's.
• Bring the road home. Let things you gather on your walks and travels have a proper place: a shelf, a bowl, a box. The Wanderer feels honoured. The Hearth Keeper gets something to tend.
• Let the fire go out, occasionally. Go away for a weekend and let the house cope. It will. So will everyone in it.

The boots by the stove

There is an image I come back to often: a pair of walking boots drying beside a wood stove. Muddy from the path, warming by the fire. To me, that is what it looks like when both archetypes are at peace. The Wanderer has come home. The Hearth Keeper has welcomed her. Neither has had to give herself up.

If you recognise yourself in this pair, you are in very good company. I am one of you. You can read more about the wider Core Life Archetype Matrix, or simply go and put your boots by the fire tonight, and see how it feels.