On Finding Home - part 1

I grew up in a “semi-remote” cabin in Juneau, Alaska. When my parents bought the lot, the home was a pan-abode cabin – essentially a Lincoln-Log cabin big enough to live in. Barely. My father designed and built a timber-frame home in its place, every log, brick, nail, and window packed up from the beach and our trusty 14' Lund skiff. This skiff, a quarter-mile beach at low tide, or a half-mile walk over the hill and through the woods were our connection to the road system, the first and last part of any journey.

From the age of six until I moved out after high school, my home was tucked out of sight and mind, hidden in the Tongass National Forest, perched over the Inside Passages of the Pacific Ocean into Southeast Alaska. Neighborhood children were scarce, and the few playmates I had in the area tended, like me, to be happy fishing for Dolly Varden and flounders from the beach, using mussels as bait; mixing elixirs and poisons both imaginary and potentially expectorant; adventuring amongst the rocks, looking for treasures – or any interesting flotsam.

I spent many a dark night feeling my way over the hill, my youthful imagination making the most of every shadow and crack in the forest around me. At times on all fours, feeling amongst the moss and rotting stumps for the void, the emptiness of the trail, wishing time and again that I had an extra flashlight, or that I had changed the batteries in the dead one I grasped like a club, ready to respond to a bear in my face as best as I could. (The nose is the softest, easiest hit on a bear, with the best likelihood of resulting in the bear's departure.) One night, with six inches of heavy, wet snow on the ground, it took over an hour for my mother, sister, our next-door neighbor, and I to find our way home in this manner, calling to one another in the dark when we found what we thought was the path, or when we needed to feel our way back to each other.

Nightmares of our tiny skiff being swamped or capsized were not always terrors experienced from the comfort of bed. At as young as eight, my chores could include taking the boat to give a parent or a guest a ride to or from the road when the water was calm. The water was not always calm, and I was not eight for long. My experience grew, and my luck saved me on several occasions, such as when I realized just feet from a jetty of rocks that I was much too close to shore, going full speed in the dark. Or when the waves stood up just past our beach, crashing over the stern of the boat even as the bow rose over the crest of the wave ahead, unable to get far enough up the wave to escape the trough into which the outboard seemed to pull, a sucking feeling in my heart as I knew that the ocean was on the brink of swallowing me into its churning embrace.

In such experiences, I learned without thinking about the lesson – I had to get home. There was no other option. Crawl on all fours, feel your way blind through a forest, turn the boat into the wind. Find home.

With many years of used-up-luck and slowly earned experience behind me, I now find myself searching for home once more. This time, I seek not a home I've found before, but a new abode for heart and soul. The journey seems more perilous without a destination, and with no idea what paths might lead me there; but as in my early years, make it home I must, or live on the road as I seek.

“Home is where the heart is”, though perhaps tired and worn, is also tried and true, an adage for the ages akin to the Golden Rule in both simplicity and longevity. As I ponder the roads ahead, feeling loss and separation as I am sundered from my community, my friends and family, I return to this thought. Rejoicing in the moment, in each sunrise and the opportunities of the new world in each new day, I remember that NOW is when and where I am, and that the only home I truly need is the space in which I find myself in that given instant. I can find solace in the air I breathe, the food I eat, the nutrients and energy flowing and cycling within and through me. I can love those I love from afar, remembering their voices, faces, and hearts. The soil beneath my feet will change as I move over the land, but in letting go of roots I can find myself a citizen of a larger community, a part of a world beyond any horizon. Moving into stillness, and finding stillness in motion: even as I seek a place to put down new roots, I carry my connections and find that distance does not sunder friendships or love. Experience will always change us, and our luck may run out or grow thin, but our history supports us, tying us together as we weave the here-and-now.

I laugh to myself as I write these words, my personal mantra of many years resounding in my mind if not ringing in my ears. I have believed this since I wrote it, nearly two decades ago in Salt Lake City, but perhaps I am only now learning how right I was when I first intoned:

nutrients cycle and energy flows,

here we are, what is:

let's go!

I have not found home yet, but I carry it in my being, and know it holds me in its safe embrace, whatever path my feet may tread.

Namaste.