Home Land
Home Land is a place where we once lived.
It is not a place where we live now. We carry it with us like a snow globe in our heart. If we lived there now it would not be Home Land or, at the least, we would not think of it as our Home Land as much as we would not think very much at all about the place where we are the most alive as being in our now home.
Why imagine the obvious of our here-and-now place on the planet?
When not in Home Land we are elsewhere. It hardly matters where the not Home Land is as one place is as good as another. We are forever mutable creatures, and if our now place is not as good as we may want in time, if we sit still enough, it wears on us until we live nothing different about it.
At times we rarely desire to be where we are at home quite as much as we desire to be where we are no longer.
We cannot exactly go back there to Home Land, actually, everyone that we remember has upped themselves by the roots and moved away, or died but the cold creek, the trees barren of leaves, the breadloaf hills, the ice and snow remain.
Remain as if waiting our return, but no, not waiting. Nature does not wait for us, the universe does not wait, or care, and it is just us in our not being there in Home Land that we miss.
It is at these times when messages that we receive from Home Land are nice gifts that we turn over and want to shake the shit out of them until the glass breaks and once more we are there.
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Author's Note
A friend on Christmas sent me a photo from a snowy creek at home. It is a place where I have memories.
Going to Home Land is explosive for me, the terrain is loaded with small mines of remembering that explode inside and cloud my feeling for being where I am when I am in being here now.
I spend a lot of time thinking about how authors think about space and time, mostly as an experience in our past, dimly viewed in our future and how we represent these shapes and movements in the imaginary worlds of our fiction.
A nice tribute of the essence of what is home and what is not. I like the metaphor of it as a snowglobe, one that we can shake and sense again, but that once visited isn't quite as we might have imagined. The land itself that we attach so much emotion to seems oblivious to our passing suggesting perhaps it is us who captured in the globe and not the land at all.
A friend once said to me that the ground remembers. I have not thought of that in years, but your piece prompted me to think harder. "Nature does not wait for us, the universe does not wait, or care".
It's the unpretty thoughts about pretty places that make us human. Then there are those who believe the universe cares.
Home. I think you captured the concept. *
Julie: Us being captured in the snow globe, I like that, very apt.
Grey: I believe the ground remembers a whole lot of things, just not that it remembers us.
James: I know of people that believe that God cares. I've not found too many that have hope in being remembered by a distant galaxy, let alone this one. Good idea to keep it in mind, though!
gets to the existential heart of the matter. wonderful title, too, helps anchoring an article of faith in nature. i will come back to this because it does feel like a meditation in words. you should read it out loud...