Scattered Musings

Later, a man lying awake,
he might ask it again,
just to hear the silence
charge him, this night
arching over your sleepless wondering,
...
just to remind himself
...
out of what immense good-bye,

each must make a safe place of his heart,
before so strange and wild a guest
as God approaches.

Li-Young Lee, Nativity


A poem Dr. Woolsey shared with us in London.

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Last night, I watched "East of Eden". A film adapation of a novel by John Steinbeck, starring James Dean. The novel is set in Salinas/Monterey, CA, which are classifiable as Northern Californian towns. Out of nowehere, I began wistfully longing, with a deep ache in my heart, for California. This doesn't happen very often; usually it occurs when I'm looking over all of my old childhood pictures and craving some REAL Mexican food. There's something very desolate about the West; something that always leaves one wondering; something that I can't quite explain, no matter how hard I try. I could use descriptors like "rugged", "untamed", and such, but I don't think that would do it justice. Of course, then again, it might. The colors there are less rich; the greens, especially. Even the blues, on the coast. Also, it rained yesterday, in Houghton, New York. It's the middle of December; it should be snowing--the snow coating the countryside like a little kid eagerly coats a makeshift gingerbread house with frosting. But it rained. Of course, it never snowed in Half Moon Bay, a town at the edge of the ocean, a town at the edge of the continent--in fact, even on a different continental plate than a town 20 minutes east by car.
A few years ago, my dad decided to take my sister and I on a trip to Monterey, as we hadn't spent a lot of time there, growing up. We usually didn't make it any further than Santa Cruz, for the beach boardwalk there in all its delight. The landscape down there is a bit different than that I grew up with. There was less sand, and more mishmashed colors in the shrubbery reaching down to the ocean. The trees were more akin to acacia trees found on African savannas. The ocean itself was more blue, more vivid, somehow; the weather was slightly more clear and less bleak. Half Moon Bay is one of the most fog-drenched towns on the entire coast of California, I'm sure. Perhaps this is why I resonated so well with London. This city with such roots in history and tradition (as I've come to associate the East Coast) yet constantly indwelt by this fog, this dampness, powerful enough to reach into the very marrow of your bone and take hold of your heart. Where is my home?
Is my home my dorm room, in Houghton, New York? My only ties to the place being my professors and my friends?
Is my home the Amish-owned house we rent in Rebersburg, Pennsylvania? A place I've not lived in for more than 3 months at a time, I think? A place my mom claims as her home.
Is my home still the house we rented in California, 756 Mill Street? With an adobe feel to it?
With childhood memories I can't quite or don't try to access?
Is my home London, a city I spent 3 months in, but that made me feel so alive? Where tea tasted somehow better than it does to me now?
All of this may just be nostalgic and sentimental fluff.
But, I'm longing for Home.
So desperately.