Monday, June 09, 2008

Home is not always where you come from.


Home is where you arrive.
....
And maybe you have to surrender something to find your way home; there is a world of other places you might be, including the place where you were born. You may need to lose a home to find one. Maybe it doesn't have to be a whole country you lose, but if it is, imagine how much deeper into you your sense of home, your newfound place, will sink. And part of what home feels like will always be the ache--that never goes--of exile from wherever it is that you are not and cannot now be again.
Home is a choice. But it's not you who makes it. You'll know you're home because it'll feel like you're the one who's been chosen.


~ an excerpt from "A Faster Kind of Sandstone" by Mark Tredinnick in Isotope

This past week marks the start of our third year in Missouri. Being here still feels new and strange, lacking the unconscious comfort of deep familiarity, the settling back with your feet up on the coffee table. The move here after 17 years in Texas served to make Texas feel like home though it never did as long as I lived there. So I've become convinced that as a product of a truly mobile society, the concept of home has become a fluid, elusive concept, perhaps determined only in hindsight, in the wake of pondering what one has left behind. And what one has taken with.