Monday, March 5, 2007

rebound

Got back last night, and today I'm still mentally on the return. It was so disorienting to arrive home to different lights left on, the sofa and coffee table at a slight cant, the pepper grinder on the countertop, and Venus running away from me. Small details that make up home, shaken just a bit loose.

I never used to get homesick when I'd travel. I never had the thought that I'd rather be back in my own abode than in the country whose soil held my feet. I used to love the grandness of airplanes (then, they are aeroplanes), the sights of transit itself, the act of shaking loose.

Am I still a traveler, now that I've found a home?

2 comments:

Susan Kelley said...

This may only be true from a certain angle, but *for me* the reason I travel is that I am looking for home in exotic and "foreign" places. I'm always hoping, at least in the back of my mind, to find that horizon that is a little familiar in its mystery, that landscape that I've been missing, yearning for somehow since birth, a place that finally totally feels "right." It might make sense, if you are anything like me in this regard, that you are more drawn to home now that you are creating one that exists exactly the way you want it to.

Posted by Bramble Gamble On Wednesday, March 07, 2007 at 12:37 PM

Susan Kelley said...

I think so. There is more than one kind of travel, and more than one scale.

Since my circumstances have kept me from traveling physically for a great many years, my travels have been more abstract: ideas, knowledge, feelings, artistic creativity. That basic Sagittarian urge can express itself in a lot of different ways.

And then where scale is concerned, when you find a place that suits you, it is almost by definition one in which the surprises and delights are tightly packed, so wandering up and down Hawthorne might be as rewarding for you as traveling to another country. I had that feeling in Munich, once upon a time. That I no longer have it here is how I know it is no longer home.

Enjoy it. Not every journey finds a destination.

Posted by Eric On Wednesday, March 07, 2007 at 2:41 PM