There are two constant and opposing cries. One the poet has phrased, “I want to take the next train out, no matter where it’s going.” The other is as directly put, in the words of any child: “I wanna go home.”
After a lifetime of traveling, my only sister has decided to move back to the small valley where we were born and raised. She says that she is coming back to where the “roots go down.”
I am delighted. It has always felt to me as if my sister and I were close, although we have become increasingly good companions and friends as we have learned to appreciate one another as adults. (As a child, the seven years between us frequently gave me the sense that in comparison to her older, beautiful, smart, athletic, and creative self, my sturdy, plodding littler being was something that lived under a bridge and ate billy-goats — formative sibling dynamics!)
When she was a small child in the 1940s’ days of gas rationing, a huge automobile trip for our family to make was the 25 mile journey into the foothills of the Appalachian mountains where my grandparents lived. Where the valley floor met the ridges of the mountain slopes, a dirt road had been carved out, leaving exposed the long angular, curling roots of the roadside trees — the “roots going down.” What they meant to her was that she was approaching “Mom’s house;” she was going to our grandparents, always referred to in our family as ” up home.”
And so, in the autumn of her life, she has come back “up home,” back to where her roots go down.
For each of us, home likely means something different. A place. A person. Sanctuary. Comfort. Roots. Something for which we’re searching. For some, the word might be very aversive, bringing images of pain or heartache. For others, “home” might be just a longing or wish or fantasy of what might exist somewhere.
Regardless, “home” has to be one of our most evocative words. There’s a line from a John Denver song: This old farm feels like a long-lost friend that conveys for me the comfort, the love, the sense of belonging held in the phrase “going home.” A safety, a warmth, a refuge from the uncertainties of the larger world. The security, the sense of something unchanging . . .
What would it be like, I wonder, to know that our life Journey is our home — when ahead of me is the empty unknown, and around me is only chaos, to know, within my very soul, that I am already “home.” I AM where the roots go down.
From the poet Rumi, there is a poem that speaks to this:
This being human is a guest-house, every morning a new arrival.
A joy, a depression, a meanness — some momentary awareness comes from an unexpected visitor.
Welcome and entertain them all! Even if they’re a crowd of sorrows, who violently sweep your house empty of all its furniture, still treat each guest honorably. He may be drawing you out for some new delight.
The dark thought, the shame, the malice — meet them all at the door laughing. And invite them in.
Be grateful for whatever comes, because each has been sent as a guide from beyond.
So even as I write this from the warmth of my fireside on this winter day, I wonder, not only what going home means, but what I have to gain by staying on the road . . .
A poem by Karle Wilson Baker speaks to my questions in a way that makes me say “ah-h-h . . .”
My life is a tree, yoke-fellow of the earth, pledged by roots too deep for remembrance — to stand hard against the storms, to fill my place. (But high in the branches of my green tree there is a wild bird singing. Wind-free are the wings of my bird; she has built no mortal nest.)
