Hello – is anybody home?

What does it mean to feel “at home” in this world? I often feel at home when I can laugh with a friend Ð where openness, trust and mutual revelation are like comfortable furniture. Slumber offers a similar experience. But when not asleep, where on Earth am I most at home?

The car rumbles off the ferry’s ramp. Migrating southwards, my spirit lifts and starts humming. Like a bird who has to sing.

Evening; arriving at the campground. I walk into the forest. A honeydew-fragrant homecoming and a hooting-morepork welcome awaits me. I am expected.

Cramped little tent but homely enough. Who cares this hard earth and lack of feather pillow? Sleep comes easily in a beech wood cradle.

Dawn at the bach. I wake to the slow, rhythmic beat of waves on a nearby shore and bell-ringing birds in the surrounding bush. Cliche perhaps, yet home is here also – where my youthful heart was formed and where, on the wing of a memory, it happily returns.

What allows me to be deeply “at home” in Nature? My feelings alone aren’t enough that popular, pink-marshmallow conception of love which considers it a lush force that does for us what we’re too lazy to do for ourselves! No, feeling is only the morning mood of love; real love is deed.

Whom we call God, is Love. I live and move and have my fragile human being in Love. And the nature of God is, in-deed, Nature. So my heart-mind seeks and finds its own nature reflected in the mirror held by divine Nature.
The Divine lies entombed in Nature; waiting patiently, silently for my homecoming. And what is my deed of love? To walk in the path of honest thought; to choose as my guide the fount of love implanted in my heart; to open the eye of my soul to nature’s script.* All this, so that through my thinking-perceiving spirit, a little of the Divine may come to life and be resurrected in me.

The sphere of the spirit is my soul’s true home.

*after Rudolf Steiner IN Verses and Meditations.
Elisabeth Alington. August 2009