Going Home

Meg had a post over at Meg’s Blog back in May in which she posed the question of why one can never really go home again. Personally, I don’t buy the idea that one cannot. Going home…in my mind…isn’t so much returning to a physical place as it is returning to a feeling. Feelings are fickle. Physically going to one’s home…going back to the town you grew up in…won’t, necessarily, give one that feeling of “being home.” Though the place may be the same and the people very similar, the remembered emotion can’t be rekindled. Why is this? Well…nostalgia is an interesting and twisted thing. It’s a remembrance of a time and place and feeling that never truly existed as a single entity, yet it is a time and place and feeling to which one longs to return. That feeling of home is a nostalgic remembrance, and truly one that going home does not recreate.

Does this mean that one cannot ever return home? No. Because as much as that feeling is not recreated by returning to that place, it can just as easily be incarnated anew in different setting. For me…it happens at the beach, overlooking rolling waves, smelling the saltwater, feeling the sand on my feet…and the feelings of home come rushing to me. It happens in the mountains as I feel enveloped by their majestic tree covered peaks. It happens surrounded by my closest friends. The feeling of going home is what home truly is. It’s not a place or a time. It’s not a seeing the house I grew up in or driving through my little western PA hometown. It’s an overwhelming feeling of love, of belonging, of warmth. Home is an emotion…not a place.