Going Home

Well you really can't. There is no 'home' left once you've vacated it, gone elsewhere. Home resides in your head, in your memory. Your 'home' has become home to someone else, someone who chose not to leave for whatever reason, necessity or eagerness to experience new opportunities.

Home is not necessarily where the heart is in any event. By the same token, the heart is where home is. And home can be anywhere. Sometimes not an actual geographical location, but anywhere your beloved is. Home is a portable, transportable, transferable place of thought, rather than an actual abode, for some.

Mankind is migratory by nature. People have always re-located, pulled up roots and explored or looked beyond the familiar in a quest for adventure or new opportunities, or in haste to depart a place that has become hostile by the advent of dislocating war.

We're also nostalgic by nature. We allow our memories to paint that which we imagine our homes to be in colours far brighter than they actually possess. We tend to forget the reasons why we felt compelled to leave home, to look elsewhere for satisfaction or for shelter from circumstances beyond our control.

We are capable and prove so, of accommodatng ourselves readily to the reality of another, adopted home. Human beings are measurably resilient, able to and capable of adapting to radically different environments, taking our little notional traditions and cultural underpinnings with us; they too are transportable, until that time when pivotal new societal mores slowly marginalize the others.

We're practical by nature, too. Our practicality permits us to balance our needs against our longings. The heart belongs more to an ideal than to a reality, in any event. We make our home where opportunity beckons, where practicality and happenstance suggest and recommend.

And the truth of the matter is, you cannot go home again. The home that was your home is quite simply no longer there, so in fact it represents something other than home; memory. The home left behind is no more than a figment of memory. Time and space, memory and place are elusive constructs.

We recall a home once known and cherished, now unrecognizable and dimly resonant faced with reality. The home we carried in memory is a sadly cherished remnant of the past, forever gone. Home is where you are.

Wherever you are, nomadic spirit.