Home

Home is a concept that I've been thinking about a lot of late. When people ask me where I am from, I honestly have no idea what to answer them. To answer the truthful, "cîvis mundî sum" seems somehow wrong. I am from somewhere, I have an origin, but I have trouble limiting it to a geographical location. Who I am stems not from one nation of origin or one school of thought, but from the path I have traveled from that summer morning half a century ago.

Home is England, the magical forest, the mysterious golf course with strange adults and constricting ivy that marked the dead wood. The stranger looking in, on a culture not his own, distinct, separate but a part of the whole. From England I gained a love of vinegar, of moody summer evenings, jack frost, and a sense of the magical world as glimpsed from a small boy's eyes in those forests so teeming with the supernatural.

Home is the room in Orem where I hid food, the books which transported me back to that magical place so far away. The outcast, who never quiet understood how to fit in, how to belong. It made me distrustful, it made me afraid, afraid that what was inside of me would never be good enough, that I would never belong.

Home is my old '93 explorer, forest green and solid. It took me on my first dates, my first heart aches, it gave me freedom and a realization that there was something, over there, some place where life is complete.

Home is where my friends are, the ones who stand beside me and understood me. The ones who accepted me.

Home is the ocean, the turbulent, ever changing sea. Whose depths contain such mystery, such delight, the raging wind wiping harsh across my skin, and hair. The glaring sun on my neck, the gentle fog which brings my grey peace.

How can I say: "This is home." When all of these are a part of home, but none of them are the answer alone. I still wonder if there will ever be a place called home, or if I will forever float along the surface of this life, never going deeper than the foam. The feeling that I have, is that home will never be a place, will never be a dot on a map--but rather the smile on the girl's face when I enter, the shouts of joy from children's voices as 'daddy comes home' and reading books to my little girl on a hammock.

And above all, the closet where my Savior sees my tears.