Finding Home
I still think that… which is, maybe people think your strange but it’s a funny feeling.
And I did…A place… you felt safe, comfortable, they knew everything about you,
You’re a… everything was familiar to you.
And it made it easy for you, to stay there.
There was nothing that would put you away from the trose.
Home is the fire you feel alive in, it is a state of being that washes you with hope and then surrounds you with joy and peace. Home is the things remembered, the anticipation of what may come and the warmth of all the love you have gathered in your life. Home is where you thrive.
The greatest challenge you have in this life is finding your way home. Some will seek it through power, wealth and fame. None of those will take you home, none of them. Home is the place where you create, every living being is meant to create and home is that place where you give your energy back into this universe. All of us have that power within us, the trick is finding our way home.
One of the ways I get home is by writing. I can work on a post for my blog or churn out another thirty words for my fantastical biography, it does not really matter, they both take me home. You might be writing code or sitting on a mountain top or smoking some herb and pondering the complexity of the galaxies, all of those can take you home. Regardless of the path that leads you home, it is a path you should walk often. When I write, I find a joy I cannot explain. I could analyze it and evaluate the results, but it still tells me that it is just home. “In Praise of Home” is like the call for dinner that my mom used to raise. Her call signaled the end of a long summer day of playing in the bunk house or blacksmiths shop on the Conrad Ranch and the anticipation of what kind of miraculous food my mom had created from the empty cupboards in that huge ancient house… cooking was her home…
Rura is Jack Smedley, Steven Blake, Adam Brown and David Foley. An incredibly talented Scottish band that has given me the gift of creative fuel. The song, “In Praise of Home” is a truly majestic alignment of the pipe and the fiddle, it is like nothing I have ever heard before. It is a magical road to home for me…
Every single track I have listened to from them is a remarkable achievement in musical magic, they get it, they have found their home. What an incredible gift of joy, prose and wonder… go wandering through their catalog and get lost… they will fill your soul with magic.
Steven Blake’s grandfather, James Russell, is the voice you hear talking about home in this song. He is talking about the memories and the friends he had from Montrose, in western Scotland. He is all of us when we have found out what home means. Thank you, Mr. Russell, for the words you gave to this magic and the path it revealed for me.
And you see the basin, and you see the steeple
When Mr. Russell says “I’m Goin Home”, electricity runs through me… every single time I hear it. This is the magic I have been writing about. This song may very well be unique to me, it may be a good song to you, but you may not feel the same magic that I do and that is fine, it just illustrates that each of us has our own definition and view of what home is. It is not a place that I can build for you, it is not a place that your partner can provide for you. Only you can unlock the door to home, my greatest hope for you is that you find it and then you learn how to find it again and again. It is its own kind of freedom.
Over the last few months, when I have been writing and had Rura’s beauty flowing into my soul, the words have just poured out of me. This song has been a creative bonfire… like no other. Rura plays and I write…I do not mean a paragraph or two, I mean a constant stream of words, pouring out of my soul like a hydrant on a hot sunny day and it is simply glorious. The power of creating something from within yourself is what I call home, it is the place we find joy and this song has been a source of creativity for me.
Let me be very honest about my own ability to find home. When I decide to listen for the dinner bell and turn away from the current little thing, then yes, I find my joy and I thrive. But so many times I ignore the call, and I run away from home and into a wilderness of despair and pain, not only for me but for the ones I love the most. There are so many dark roads that I ran headlong into, shouting and braying like a mule that has no idea why he is there or what he needs from the hole he just arrived in. I am so blessed to have found my way out of each one… we run into them, we don’t blunder in or get pushed in, we run into them and if you are honest, you know exactly what I am referring to. Find your home, and find your way back, time and time again because we are so good at walking away from joy….
Home is where we create, and when we create, we leave a signed copy of the fire that we are born with, and those who find that fire can be nourished. This is not a religion or doctrine; this is the real magic that lives in our world. It lives within the music I write about or the image you just painted. It is the meal that was just shared by friends and the words of the poet who just made you cry. Everything we create is from our home and if we choose to share it then we are richer as a species. I do not know about where your spirit is at right now, but I can use some hope, I need to believe that we have value beyond destroying each other and the planet we live on. Find your home, create what you were born to create and leave your signature to nourish the world. You may be convinced that you are not creative but that is a lie, every single human is a creative. Find your home and thrive.
This is about the honesty of looking in the mirror and knowing that the man I see is so incredibly flawed, but that is who I am, and I can only survive if I come to terms with who I am and embrace the gift I have found in finding home…. So, I write, I write to you, I write to me, and I write to get home.
Listening, learning and growing
A Connoisseur's Lullaby 