Post No. 8 Coming Home – Fairmont, Montana to Coles Road, Whidbey Island

Perhaps we leave home because of home, not so much to escape home, but more to intensify our view of home, to help us see so much more clearly why home is home?

These are far from complete reflections; they are beginning excavations into a rich and complex experience that is only just a little bit understood.

Something happens out there on all of that land, those 1,000’s of miles and acres. Something happens there that does not happen here. (Or if it happens here, I don’t notice it as much.) I’m still chewing on a suggested distinction between how First Nations Peoples and Euro-Americans relate to land, to a specific land. Part of what I can see from this point is that I relate to the land “there” in another mode from the one I use here at home. It may be about a degree of attention, of being more able to see what is there without the immunity or blindness that comes from extreme familiarity. But, incomplete as the relationship to that land may be, it still makes a huge mark upon me, on who I am, on my “identity.” For one thing, that land stops me and causes/ allows me to see that this land isn’t the only land, that my world is not the center of the Universe, and that however grossly “different” that land may be from this land, we – all of us – are still bonded together in spite of / through the distinctions.

I am home again, here in this land that is stunningly beautiful, AND I am also still struck by the other kinds of beauty (and pain) that I saw in Eastern, WA, Idaho, Wyoming, North and South Dakota, and Montana.

I used to think that it was only air travel that has this time-delayed-adjustment-factor as a side effect. Now, even though I’ve been home for two days from a “road trip”, some part of me is still back there in Idaho, Montana, North and South Dakota, and Wyoming. I’m not at all sure when those parts will catch up to these parts here in this land. And I’m also still trying to figure out what those other parts are. At the very least, those parts open up   new spaces, desires, and connections within me.

I am profoundly thankful for those new spaces, desires and connections.

And next week we go to New York City, and take on yet another distinction.