FINDING HOME

I called my brother yesterday. Our conversations are always a bit of a conundrum, mainly because his boundaries with every encounter seem to arbitrarily change. We grew up together. So there’s this assumed intimacy on my end. I guess I’m learning after all these years that a shared past isn’t an entitlement to climb inside someone’s head. “Easy now,” I think I hear him whisper when the conversation begins.

Despite easy being difficult for me, I call his cell and listen with my heart for the sound of his own, opening just a little, on the other end of the screen.

Today, I am a homing pigeon, the longing for something distant yet familiar worth the risk of navigating rough terrain.  

This is the season of unchartered territory and I am longing for the voices of my people. Like a magnetic force, I am being pulled across thousands of miles and even dimensions of time to who I once was, the root of me crying out in thirst.

Home. What does that look like for all of us now? It is the still quiet voice in the darkest of night, a voice [our own or one who has known us from the beginning of time] saying, “I’m here. You are not alone.”

Who we are now, especially now, can only be found when we agree to spend some time away—away from opinions and chatter, even away from the closest of friends—until we discover, maybe for the first time, who we are without being surrounded by the familiar.

I am a homing pigeon. My onboard system pings and tracks until, no matter how far I wander in my head or my heart, I find my way home.