At home in the world

For decades I have referred to Ireland as my "spiritual home," and indeed I feel a level of natural familiarity and peace there, an immediate orientation that resembles what I feel in my actual Utah home.  Ireland has always seemed to me like a place that I just "get."  

But one of the pleasures of this last year has been the luxury of lingering in a wide variety of places, sinking into a new place until it becomes a familiar place, whose rhythms and values and quirks start to be a part of my own psychic day.  I've been able to realize that I feel a kind of kinship with a goodly number of places.  Or, to say it differently, I have happily vibed into alignment with many formerly unfamiliar places--which has made these places, too, start to feel more like home.

Is the widening catalogue of places I feel at home a function of my having been to more places than I had been when I first went to Ireland as a young person and found myself settling into the place?  That is, is my expanded sphere of spatial comfort a result of my world having expanded?  I might be tempted to think so, except that even before this year of wandering (and indeed, even before my time in Ireland in the 1990s) I'd done a fair bit of traveling, so the variety of the world's places wasn't exactly unknown to me.  

Perhaps it is rather, as I suspect, that I myself have expanded--not as a result having traveled across continents during this past year but as a result of having traveled through a lot of more life's terrain, the dislocations and disorientations of joy, grief, loss, gain, learning, forgetting.  I think that, as we move through years, we have more opportunities to learn to find a place in our displacement.  And so the familiarity of the external landscape matters less than the recognizable contours of the inner landscape.  

My pal John Milton knew something about this phenomenon, I think.  The guy certainly understood displacement, having lived through national and personal crises and changes, triumphs and catastrophes, that would have made anyone feel dislocated.  So at the end of Paradise Lost (SPOILERS!), the archangel Michael explains to Adam and Eve--just at the point that they must leave their domestic paradise of Eden--that there's another way to think about home:

                       ...though all the Starrs

Thou knewst by name, and all th' ethereal Powers,

All secrets of the deep, all Natures works,

Or works of God in Heav'n, Aire, Earth, or Sea,

And all the riches of this World enjoydst,

And all the rule, one Empire; onely add

Deeds to thy knowledge answerable, add Faith,

Add vertue, Patience, Temperance, add Love,

By name to come call'd Charitie, the soul

Of all the rest: then wilt thou not be loath

To leave this Paradise, but shalt possess

A paradise within thee, happier farr.

Milton's point--echoed elsewhere in Paradise Lost, is that the place doesn't really matter.  You can't lose paradise (or Hell!--sorry, Satan!), because it's a state of mind rather than a location.  I wonder if my goal (unknown even to myself) over this last year has been to follow a life-season of dispossession with the kind of movement that would make dispossession the default setting, with the resulting understanding that I can feel grounded through any displacement, the loss of any paradise, because it's not about the external conditions at all.  I may not have planned it that way, but I think that's how it feels from this end-stage vantage point.  

(Mullaghmore, Ireland)

As Jay always used to say, quoting his yoga guru, when things got tough:  Why fearing?  Not a bad mantra for all the journeys, brief and long, that we all must take.