The impossibility of “home”

But where, after we have made the great decision to leave the security of childhood and move on into the vastness of maturity, does anybody ever feel completely at home? – Madeleine L’Engle, A Circle of Quiet

I do not want to believe that which is implied by this question. You would think, that after a decade, more or less, of living away from “home” I would have accepted that I will never feel at home again.

If you lay on your back in the yard of the house I grew up in, the yard portrayed in the banner at the top of this blog, you will feel soft earth and softer grass. On a good day, you will see a blue blue sky. You might see the clothes on the clothesline, or the large water tower on a neighboring plot. You will hear cows on one side, sheep on another, and the sound of trucks zipping down the road. You might smell some of those same cows.

It was a wonderful place to grow up. It is still a wonderful place to be. When I think of what I miss, now that I live in a city, it is the vastness, space and grass and air and room to run.

Please don’t think that I don’t love living in a city. I am intoxicated by the people and the bustle, two things that were decidedly lacking in my childhood. But I also love silence and solitude.

Is this why we never feel at home? It’s not because there are places we can’t access, but that we have discovered that terrible, insatiable complexity that lives inside all of us. It’s not that I can’t have what I am wanting, but that I will always want infinitely more than I can have.

As soon as we pass that stage of having mommy, daddy, brother and the blue blue sky be enough, we realize there is never enough. Is this the God-shaped hole in our hearts?