Where do you go when you go back home? Do you have a home to go back to? A home place? I consider lucky those who feel this is possible. Other than the archetypal home that is always with us on the spiritual plane, internalized, immortalized within the realm of psychic reality, home seems to be more and more illusive. In the outer world.

For a wanderer and bridge-maker such as myself, home seems to be the place where I feel welcome, if only for a brief time...in companionship with the swiftly flowing river, watching the bones of trees flesh into green, and pink and white and lavender, or in the sweet company of a song bird who sings an if of day into yes!*

Home has become increasingly illusive to me. I truly miss the physical places that once were home to me in this world. The quality of air and sunlight. The caress of the sea breezes coming across the bay and up into the hills. As a child, when I was very sad or needed to be alone, I would climb up the ladder to the roof of the garage, where I could sit up against the upper trunk of the old fig tree in the backyard. Such a wonderful, old, loving and giving tree. She was home to me when I felt forsaken or needed to find myself again.



Photo by Corbis, from truthout

I think there is less and less real home left in this world. I don't mean to be negative or pessimistic, but as I mourn my own personal losses of home, I also mourn the loss of the reality of home in this physical world. There is something terribly wrong. Our home, our blessed vessel of earth and air and fire and water, is being devoured by the wolf of consumerism and profit and free trade and profit and more profit.

I wonder how much home we could give back to ourselves by letting go of our lust for having things. Always another car, a bigger and better house, yet another gadget. Every year. Every other year. Every six months. I wonder how much more whole and healthy and sound we could become by giving back to each other the true places of home: the health and beauty of the lands and waters and winds which sustain us.

I am sorry dear friends, but I cannot help feeling that we are on the very verge of losing our home. Enjoy and love every bit of it, as much as you can, wherever you are, at any time of day or night, with all your heart and soul.

If nothing else works, perhaps, just maybe, this love alone can help return to us our Home Sweet Home.

*thank you e.e. cummings