Sunday Ponderings

The ache for home lives in all of us,

the safe place where we can go as we are 

and not be questioned. 

Maya Angelou

Anna is doing amazing and has truly found 'another home' up on the hill at Holy Cross - and this mama's heart is so grateful for the swift ease with which it seemed to come. 

But I know not all days this fall will be easy - and there will be times she will wish for home - for even just a meal, a sleep, or the sound of the back door. 

I have known well this feeling of homesick during several times in my own life. 

When I was away from home and a new freshman in college - even when I was newly married and starting my own home. Both times I was profoundly homesick. 

Anna has been taking a class and they ventured into the topic of being homesick and what it means. 

"I usually feel it upon the first moment of waking in a new place: the sense of disconnect. Sight, touch, imagination - my wakening senses grope out into the morning light for something familiar by which to pull myself out of sleep and into the new day. When a foreign surface, an unexpected corner, a ceiling or window, an unfamiliar slant of light meets my groggy eyes, I jolt awake, startled by the strangeness. And for a few moments I am afraid. 

I've know that jet-lagged moment in my tiny student room in Oxford, where I am studying. Every atom, every surface and smell, declares itself foreign. I move within my new environs with pained clumsiness, as if something vital in me were sick. I do not belong here. The gray walls and yellowed light are foreign to me. No known voice will break the silence. 

I open my eyes and sit on the edge of the bed with an ache that is my longing for the people I love, for refuge from loneliness. I move among the shapes and surfaces of this room, this city, this new life as a stranger. A stranger in all the potent meaning of that word - someone who neither knows nor is known, regarded and regarding with a slight suspicion born of the fact that love is a kind of knowledge, and her I have none. 

The first breath of every morning I ache for home. 

I wonder how many of us wake up every day with just such a longing - perhaps not the sharp, obvious desire of homesickness but a wistful, lingering sense of need. how many of us bear a haunting sense that we are strangers in the spaces of our own lives, moving from place to place, from work to house to social gathering without any true sense of belonging. Perhaps the ache is not so much a desire for something we miss as an awareness that something is missing. We have food, roofs over our heads, entertainment, friends, but still we yearn for something we can barely name. 

That yearning is, at its core, a longing for home. 

What is it about home that we long for? 

We hunger to be deeply known and in the knowing, held. We pine to belong to a place in which our story began, where the stories of other intertwine with ours in a history that sustains us through dark nights and winter seasons, where our loneliness can be comforted and we can encounter the affection of God and human alike. We year for familiar beauty, for the knowledge that the physical trappings of our lives, the space in which we breathe and suffer and love, have meanings. We want a refuge that is more than a house, with rooms that speak to us with a living presence and enwrap us with welcome when we return. We hunger for the rich community of the family that ought to fill those rooms." Sarah Clarkson, The Life Giving Home 

We have been on a family text/chart and this morning I texted Anna a list of all of the things that have popped into my head that we could do when she is home on fall break in October. 

Her reply made us (Scott, Abigail and I) laugh. 

"NooooOoooooOoooooo. Anna doesn't want to kayak to see the fall leaves or mini golf on the hill that will be picturesque in October. Anna wants mommy's cider donuts, mulled cider, fall movies, and us." 

And so we will take our girl home to feast in all of the things that fill her heart. Familiar food, good movies we love, and time here in this home. - a place where she is "deeply known, and in the knowing, held." 

I texted her back this quick photo from my phone. 

"then that is what we will do," I said to her.