At Home Inside

The notion of home we generally talk about day to day is a building we call our house, our hometown, or the place of our childhood. It’s geographical. Yet the sensation of home is so much more. Home is emotional, experiential. That warmth of familiarity when you get off a plane. The comfort of your own pillow arriving back in your bed late at night. True home offers the letting down of a guard. Rest and recovery. Ease. 

4,500 cubic feet per second of water wash me through a deserted canyon somewhere in northern Idaho. I’m floating in a class 2 rapid on my back. A PFD keeps my head above water as the waves crest and fall back down, bobbing my head like a buoy. My feet pointed downstream to protect me from any oncoming rocks. I can’t really see where I am going. I don’t really know where I am. And yet, somehow, I feel at home. 

The concept of home implies non-home. A quest or a journey away from home. Out there. Where there is no ease or relaxation. Where we are on edge, poised, alert and inherently uncomfortable. The hero of this story leaves home, journeys to the unknown, and returns anew. 

Yet, just as we may have a conceptual physical home, we too have a spiritual home. Or a “center” as some people call it. A place of being in this moment that is effortless. Where there is no searching or grasping. No journey or quest to be undertaken. A home such that we are at rest through the thick of present experience. 

Home is being here now. An immediate presence matched with a release of all desire that this experience be any different. That there are no other moments. No need for future relaxation or challenge. No need to attain now or later. 

Home is letting go of the need to feel at home, or the desire to want relaxation or thrills. 

Home is more than a place or feeling. Home is where we always are and always were when we let go of everywhere else. The presence of home in our lives allows us to float through the rapids of life as if they are perfect in every way. As if we can rest our heads in the turbulent white water and experience this moment fully and wholly for eternity.