home

I am on a plane. It's dark out. The flight is a long one, thirteen hours. I lay back, ready, breathing air that's as thick as liquid. My mind dissolves, like an effervescent tablet, in the glow of a deep purple sky as we fly over rich green land.

Earth.
Home.

I realize I forgot something and fly back to a concrete city of gray. Noise registers at higher frequencies here. Cars and crowds go by. Life of a different kind pulsates all around, but it's equally familiar to me. I am equally, though differently, at home.

I have been having lots of dreams lately, dreams that don't feel like dreams. They're detailed, vivid. I dream of other places- of nature, of the city.

Home is an ambiguous word with many meanings. There's the personal home, which, for me, is Iowa. It's also New York, Sweden, England, the Caribbean, the South of France, Italy- all places I have spent time and/or have familial roots.
Then there is the broader idea of home, a hermeneutic home, the ectoplasm from which life emerges and returns, The Great Mystery.

Nature, in its raw, virginal state, has this vibration of home. The intimacy of shared body and breath in its most emotionally open, naked state also has this resonance. Altruistic charity, the conquering of fear through physical feats (including the act of speech/communication), transcendent, spiritual reflection, the experience of death- all these things touch the fleshy membrane of home in the universal sense.

There is a reason I have been dreaming and thinking of home lately. Its broader concept is a thing I have been in search of my entire life. The narrower concept, that of a roof to call ones own, is a thing I have been in search of for the past two and a half months.

It is with great relief and happiness that I can say I have finally found it- my own little New York home.