My earliest memories are of feeling it. I had no words for it, but it made me stop in my tracks. A four year old rarely knows how to describe what he is feeling, but sometimes what he feels freezes him. There inside me was something powerful. I looked around… looked up into the sky. And then I ran on. But that feeling became my companion, wending and weaving its way into my experiences and memories.

I could never predict when it would come burning into my heart. Sometimes in the middle of nowhere, sometimes in the middle of a crowd. Sometimes in the city, sometimes in a field. Sometimes on the road, sometimes in bed. But there was always one guaranteed way to bid it, and that was to walk the night and look up at those dancing lights made visible by the darkness surrounding them.

There it would be, waiting for me. It starts as an intense longing, before breaking into a cosmic sort of loneliness, which would resolve into a feeling of homesickness. The loneliness wasn’t alone, however – it was the kind of loneliness one gets when remembering their faraway lover. I felt connected to someone – someone I could almost remember if I tried. But that someone wasn’t here with me, and this was loneliness. My heart would fill with so much desire that I felt it could rend the very fabric of reality. I would send that desire out and expect something to happen.

We come into this world with a cry. We come into this world needing. Needing food, needing touch, needing care, needing protection, needing love. We come into this world capable of nothing but receiving. Those of us who survived our years of utter dependency were given enough to survive. Some were given enough to thrive. Yet, for most there is a mixture of provision and pain.

I always sought privacy in my pain. Silent tears, huddled in the closet or hiding in the woods. I tried so many ways to release the pain, to express it. I wanted to paint it out, sing it out, play it out, write it out, daydream it out, build it out – any sort of creation was a way to release pain. The worlds I envisioned, the people I invented and then fell in love with, the ideas I worked and reworked. I transformed our world, and then built new worlds. I painted eternity with dreams and wrote soulful sonnets in the constellations.

This pain… it forges us. It breaks us down and remakes us. A million people react in a million ways. I only know my way, and somehow it carved out of me a heart that longed, a heart that cared, a heart that desired to love, a heart that fought for life. It injected my blood with the fuel of passion and then set it on fire. It was overwhelming at first, and not knowing any better I put myself to sleep for years to survive the intensity until I had grown enough to let it burn within me. Now I look back on the pain and am grateful. I would never choose the path I walked, but I wouldn’t trade who I’ve become for anything.

I always knew the homesickness and loneliness were connected. I looked for their fulfillment in the god I had been raised with. I looked for their fulfillment in the eyes of others. I looked for their fulfillment in the love of another. But still, I’d wander the night and feel homeless.

We make little promises to ourselves – sometimes so quickly that our conscious mind is never aware. Maybe we tell ourselves that “someday” we will travel, or someday we will learn to play an instrument, or someday we will write, or someday we will get in shape, or someday we will achieve some goal or pursue something we’ve always felt we should. Life goes on, and the years run by faster and faster until we wake up in the realization that “someday” is now, for soon the opportunity will be over.

I told myself that someday I would seek in earnest this “home” I longed for – someday, I would pursue it with all my heart. That “someday” came like a hurricane and blew my life apart.

Why hadn’t this always been the pursuit of my life? I can look back and see I was fighting a war. The enemy came upon me suddenly in those battle fields with a fury in his eyes, intent on snuffing me out. I was fighting for my life.

It seems a common story throughout history – the journey back home starts with a fight for survival. We leave a bloody battlefield and shortly afterward the pangs of homesickness awaken us to the realization that we are now free to journey homeward. Like Ulysses we remember the beauty we have known, and are carried back home by the burden of love. I must confess, this last thought is not original by me, but my soul resonated and burned with it when I first heard it in the lyrics of Josh Garrels’ song, “Ulysses” on his album, “Love and War and the Sea In Between”. The entire song is beautiful and has become my anthem during this part of my journey. It contains these lines,

But true love is the burden that will carry me back home
Carry me with the memories of the beauty I have known

It is from this song that I got the name for my blog, and I encourage you to hear it out: 

It’s in those nights between battles that the warrior hearts look upward at the lights dancing upon their darkness and feel the longing for home. I’ve felt it my entire life… the bitter pangs of homelessness. A sense of being out of place, an outsider to the lands in which we dwell. I kept trying to return home, but found myself on a more perilous journey than I at first anticipated. I was misdirected, and looked outward for the path… where I was left broken upon the road. A breaking that awakened me to remember that home was inward, and it was across those seas I must sail.

This blog is about my journey “home”, to the source of love and life. It is first a journey inward, for it is the divine I seek, and I’ve learned that my only connection to the infinite lies within. But it is also a journey outward – for everything is connected, and we sense this as we drink from the eternal river that flows through our innermost being. We find ourselves connecting to everything around us in ways we never imagined before. Love wells up within us and can’t help but spill outward.

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