Coming Home

When this last trip to the east coast, to graduate and to research, is done, I will go home. I will rent a little place not far from where I grew up and take this year for discernment. 

I am going home. Home to the wooded trails I know so well and to the ocean beaches and the dripping moss under the towering trees. Home to the maritime climate in one of the rainiest regions in the world, home to tiny towns and friendly people scratching out a living in a declining economy, home to hay fields and aging barns and failing farms, home to a place where the height of the year’s entertainment is the rodeo and county fair. Home, too, to the people I grew up with and to generations of my extended family—my great uncle and my baby niece, my mentors and pastors, my old bosses and coworkers, people who watched me grow up, some whom I want to see and others I hope I never bump into.

Over the past decade away, I have realized just how much this place has meant to me and just how attached I am to it. No matter where I have lived, this place, this land and its people bordered by the sea and the great forests, has made its way into my dreams at night and my deepest longings by day. And so it is time to come back to it, at least for a time and perhaps for a long time.    

I have always felt that I have belonged to this place in a peculiar way. As much as my education and my career path have encouraged me to become an individual without a history and without a fixed place, I have never been able to shake my loyalty to where I come from and to the soil that carries the bones of my grandfather and the sweat of my childhood labor.

 In a time where many wander and where so many of us long for home, perhaps it is time to begin to learn anew the value of place. To learn again how to find home. To learn anew how we become a part of something larger than ourselves and how we can become dependent on each other. In this time of economic crisis and hardship, perhaps this is our best hope for the future.