Going Home~

Image by Martina Lang

There is a feeling I get whenever I go to my hometown that always surprises me. It comes the instant that I arrive in that valley surrounded by those familiar hills and mountains. At first it comes in the form of a kind of amnesia, where the memories of my new life disappear. As the car meanders down the winding road to the place of my childhood, I am nowhere else but HOME. In these moments I can barely remember that I ever left and I marvel at this feeling that seems to come up from the very ground I walk upon.

In my mind I can still hear my grandmother's voice showing me the buttercups blooming on the hillside just before town. "Spring is here" she would say, and the way she would say it, those three simple words, would always make me think that the whole world was new and beautiful and filled with promise. As my mother slows the car to round the last bend into town, we both look up at the hill to those tiny yellow blooms that speak to us of all the days before this one, and all of those to come after. We are silent for a moment, before we look at one another and say, "Grandma's buttercups."

Image from Internet

I have heard it told, that in the indigenous traditions, the people believe that the spirits of the land welcome us back to our birthplace. That the elemental beings and the guardians of the earth who dwell in our homeland, never forget us. That we are as much a part of the land as the trees and the blades of grass, as the yellow buttercups on the green hillside.

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Walking by the creek with my little niece, looking up at a circling hawk in the April sky, I think I might agree with those wise indigenous ones. That indeed there is a kind of invisible magic inviting us to sink down into the roots of our own beings and drink up the nourishment of being HOME.

When I get on my plane tonight and I fly over these beautiful and sacred mountains I will give thanks to this good earth for reminding me of this beautiful circle I am a part of. And when I walk through the front gate of my little green cottage, 300 miles away from my hometown, another feeling will greet me. Another sense of HOME, and one that is just as wonderful. When my dog licks my face in his enthusiasm to see me after four long days, and my man put's the kettle on, I will remember my new life in all of it's beauty, just as I have remembered my old life.

Someone once said, "Home is where the heart is," and I think I would have to agree.