Home

“So you are going home?” they asked me. Having lived overseas (or away from “home”) and in many places and countries for more than 15 years now, it had me thinking what that means… HOME. What does that mean to you?

I find it difficult to say where I am at home now. I have gotten so used to the places I stay, and back in the land of my childhood much has changed. I am no longer living the same life style and neither do my old friends, and even families have changed. There is new wives and husbands, parents have turned into old people or died, old relatives are gone, kids have grown up. Teenage and student friends have turned into mothers and fathers, with teenagers that I can now have real conversations with 🙂 It is an interesting feeling of old and new mixing… new perspectives, new life styles, and yet the same feeling of closeness and bond.

A while ago I was reading an article which had me nod my head…. “The philosopher Heraclitus, born in Ephesus on the Aegean coast of Turkey, said in the fifth century BC, “You cannot step twice into the same river, for other waters are continually flowing on.” Expats understand this concept more than most.”

But when I went for a walk this morning I suddenly felt a memory of old sense of home. I realized how I spend most of my time as a child roaming the fields and meadows  near the dike (levee), cows and sheep and ducks and geese, a cool breeze and real clouds. And when I walked thru the woods I noticed on the ground, the leaves in that favorite red that I now love painting with 🙂

Still home to me seems to be more of a situation than a place. I feel at home when I am painting and forgetting all about my surroundings and are absorbed in the process of the brush magically finding its way on the canvas. I feel at home when I can let my fingers play the guitar or dance just for myself. Perhaps a place that my yoga teacher describes when she reminds us, “Now, forget who you are and where you are and where you are going…” Or as Neale Donald Walsh desribes it in his book “Home, in a live that never ends… “ without leaving this body or this world.
That’s the place I would call HOME.

So… HOME. What does that mean to you?