Wendell Berry’s story, Making it Home, has a lot to say about coming home after a long journey. I’ve changed the gender because it fits me so well:
She had crossed the wide ocean and many a river...[She] had come a long way, trusting somebody else to know where she was, and now she knew where she was herself. ...Once it had seemed to her that she walked only on the place where she was. But now, having gone and returned from so far, she knew that she was walking on the whole round world.
It’s an artifact of having been gone a long time that, at first, home feels a little foreign even as it feels familiar. Yesterday, having been home a week, I finally started to feel “at-homeness” all the way down to my bone marrow. Now I can begin nurturing the tender sprouts that are springing from the seeds planted on the road trip.
Here’s today’s question: Who am I when I am far from anyone who knows who I am?
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Perhaps it is then that you are yourself. Often the people that know us impose expectations around roles, or we allow different sides of ourselves to show based on who we are with. And if we take the time to be with people who do not know who we are we can see what happens with who we thought we were.
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