Where The Heart Is

There is a com­mon say­ing: “Home is where the heart is.” That is well and good, but where is the heart? Like other pat say­ings, it leaves you hang­ing. Sooner or later you have to dig a lit­tle deeper. The answer is a lit­tle dif­fer­ent for each person.

For some, home is when they walk into their gar­den or the den where the leather recliner resides. For oth­ers, it is a lit­tle more abstract. For them the heart has to do with cer­tain feel­ings. Over­all, “home” is a vari­ety of places and feel­ings, but deep down inside it has an ulti­mate definition.

For me, the heart is at home when it yearns and won­ders. The con­nec­tion is found when look­ing at the night sky or gaz­ing toward the dis­tant hori­zon. I am home when I dis­cover a new mys­tery. I have lived a lot of places and all of them have been home and not home at the same time. Home is not a place but a Presence.

Nos­tal­gia has a place. It is good for remem­ber­ing places that felt like home for a while, but I have always been keen on the eter­nal for­ward progress of the jour­ney. Even when I live a long time in one place, it is jour­ney mixed with novel expe­ri­ences and deep mem­o­ries of the past. No sin­gle place seems to scratch the itch.

At the core of my being is the phrase, “…and the soul returns to God that gave it…” — pretty haunt­ing but very affirm­ing. There is a final des­tiny and a per­ma­nent home. The jour­ney there has its places, but they are just stops along the way. Even if you live your whole life in one town, the yearn­ing to con­nect beyond is there. Some­times the jour­ney is in a mile radius of your birth, some­times it cov­ers the globe. The heart goes from itself and returns to itself in real­ity and imag­i­na­tion. Some­how it always finds its way home.