Coming Home

What does that mean: coming home? How is that even possible? Is there a home that one could come back to when everything has changed and we can never be the way we were?

 Isn’t it a shameful to have to return home - a defeat, a retreat, a regression? 

Is it possible for us to see coming home as a beginning rather than an end? 

Our great challenge is, in fact, to return to where we started and see it anew, as if for the first time.  How will we need to see differently, understand ourselves differently, live differently?

In this age of present and impending migrations of people from their ruined home countries, how is it possible to speak of “coming home?”  Or is it more critical now than ever?  Dark times may well be upon us but that does not mean that there are no remedies for our folly and hubris, our ignorance and arrogance.  

To be rich in a world where some suffer and die of hunger, of displacement, of powerlessness is criminal.  Our civilization is a civilization of criminals. 

It is not criminal to be a damaged soul and long for the security that being rich is supposed to confer.  That fearfulness is as old as our species, and perhaps older still. It is not criminal to dream big dreams and do great things.  To create and lead, to organize and coordinate, to excel. (Though one has to ask excel in comparison to what? Each other? Is that the only way we know who we are? By beating each other? By impoverishing and destroying the lives and livelihoods of other beings, both human and nonhuman?  In excelling, don’t we always have to ask: “what am I destroying, making worse by being ‘better than’?”)

I don’t have any answers, only evolving questions. 

The idea of coming home goes against the grain of the American/global capitalist myth of expansion, growth, exploration, displacement, tourism, exploitation.  It is embarrassing to have to go home, to be sent home, to live at home.  One is supposed to be out there conquering all the time.  Disrupting everything.  

Coming home means that one has accepted that there are limits, which is anathema to the American myth of conquest and limitlessness.  (Anathema, heresy, mental breakdown.)

If the myth of conquest and limitlessness is what is limiting us from growing up and seeing the world objectively then we would be wise to speak out against that myth when it is invoked.  If we can never come home because we are afraid - afraid of our mortality, of the idea of limits - then we ought to get over our fears. 

We all go out and return home everyday.  It is a little art-form that most of us spend a life-time learning - to balance work and home. To learn how to care for a home and a family.   We have larger cycles of exploration and return in our lives. As a global civilization, do we know how to come home; how to care for our home with commitment and passion?  Not yet. It is an art we have yet to learn together.  Our next renaissance - in which we build a culture of being at home: in this world, finite and infinite; with ourselves as mortal, gifted animals.  In which we make a richness of life and living things, because that is true wealth.