Finding Home

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In Rocky Mountain High, John Denver sings of "coming home to a place he'd never been before."  Denver and co-author Mike Taylor seem to be echoing the gentle, poetic notion that you can "come home" to a place where you were not born, nor had you ever lived. You look around, you take a deep breath and wonderfully, everything just feels right. You are home. 

I don't doubt that.  It must be almost two decades ago that we hired a young woman with the ink barely dry on her Ph.D. from the University of Utah. She was a western gal, through and through. However, not long after joining our faculty she made her first visit to Ocracoke Island on the Outer Banks. Upon returning she declared that she had "come home." Nothing she has done since would contradict that assertion. So again, I do not question the notion that one can "come home to a place you've never been before." I am just jealous. 

I have lived in Raleigh since 1981 - so 36 years. Both my daughters were born here. My professional life is defined by my years at NC State. Still, it doesn't really feel like "home" in the mystical sense of Denver's paean to the Rocky Mountains. Don't get me wrong, it has been, and continues to be, a nice ride. It just doesn't have the spiritual, transcendent "home" feeling that Denver ascribes to his mountains. No place does. But that is probably my fault. I may have set my sights a bit high, or perhaps in the wrong direction altogether. 

You see, the events that define a Denveresque sense of "home" for me are not so much cases of where, as they are of when. Scattered throughout my life are moments of intense harmony, when everything feels perfect, when I am "home." We, as spiritual creatures, have a tendency to turn the places where those harmonic moments occur into sacred spaces.  So we have shrines to which we make pilgrimages. "Home" in Denver's sense turns that notion upside down. "Home" becomes a semi-sacred place where harmonic moments occur more frequently than anywhere else in the world. In Denver's world, you do not travel to the shrine. The shrine is the home. I simply have not found mine. 

Those moments that do seem to manifest a Denveresque kind of "home" for me do not share a common locale. Many are harmonic moments that I recall from my childhood, and I realize that I tend remember those events through rose-colored synapses, perhaps even to the point of bending historical fact to fit the tenets of Distilled Harmony. Still, to "come home to a place I've never been before," I would have to encounter a place that would echo those recalled harmonies. 

For example, my memories of rainy days on the front porch in Springfield, Ohio demand that "home" would need to be rainy - like this:

Rain

It is a gentle, cleansing rain.

The air is softer for it. 

The acrylic carved landscape 

Fades aptly to watercolor. 

Insects fight its somnolent call 

To buzz and bumble apace. 

I find myself stirred not so much to sleep, 

But to its less insistent cousin, 

A quiet nap.

Drops are interrupted  

High in the canopy. 

Dancing off leaves  

They gather in crooks and crannies 

Until they overflow  

Into bark's craggy channels 

And dance a zig-zag path  

To the forest floor.

It is a softly soaking rain

Filling the valley at lambing. 

The bright blush of motherhood  

Is rinsed away in rills among the clover, 

Trickling down to brooks, then streams, 

To rivers that lead to the distant imagining  

That is the sea. 

But then some magic moments in the donkey pasture above Clearwater Ranch in Philo, California demand it be sunny - like this:

The Meadow

If you lie 

On your back 

And hold very still 

With your eyes 

On the blue  

Bowl above, 

You may hear 

A quiet sort  

Of curious buzz, 

Preceding  

The funniest 

Bumblingest  

Bee 

Who bumps 

From flower to flower 

Before disappearing  

Back into the sky 

Trailing her buzzing 

Behind her. 

A ladybug eyes 

An Everest of grass 

And slowly  

Begins her ascent. 

Upon claiming  

The peak 

She spreads  

Spotted wings 

And soars off to 

A sheltering tree. 

Thus she avoids 

Toasty fates 

For her brood 

And decades of 

Deep therapy. 

The mockingbird  

Knits  

A complete  

Symphony  

With songs stolen 

From here  

And from there, 

That echo about 

In the morning's  

Soft light 

Accompanying  

The sweet  

Scented air.

Nowhere is sunlight 

Transformed 

Into life 

More magically  

Than 

In a meadow,  

In the morning.

Perhaps you see my problem. It seems that there are folks lucky enough to have a particular place they call home. A physical space where everything feels right. The mountains, the sea, even a particular structure on a particular piece of land. Home is right there. They can point to it.

For me home is in my head. 

"Lucky you!” I hear you saying. "You carry “home” around with you. Wherever you go, you are home.”  True to a certain extent.  Home is up there between my ears.  But strangely I can’t always get “there” from “here.”  That transcendent space of “inner peace” has a way of playing hide-and-seek with us.  "Ha! Ha! Here I am between your ears but you can’t find me for love nor money!”  

I keep looking.  Reike, meditation, a big sheet of blank paper with lots of colorful markers, calm and gentle music, fighting the inclination to enter into debates with those seeking victory or angry affirmation instead of insight.  All the time carrying “home” around between my ears. From the outside it looks a lot like napping, but inside - whoa! We’re climbing the Himalayas in here! 

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