Find Their Way Home

A young FaceBook friend, Lisa Bruce, engulfed in the devastation of the Oklahoma tornadoes posted her heart felt feelings that included this line: Hoping lost loved ones find their way home. What a beautiful thought.

It triggered in me deep thoughts about humans and animals true north, our home, what ever that home may be.

When I was young and less wise than I am now I once waxed poetic about our home and dad said, "It won't feel like home when mom and I are gone, it will just be a house on 50th street. Dad was right. Like gazing at the dead body of a loved one, the essence that made them them is gone, the body that is left is not them.

Homes can be devastated, ask Jeff and Oklahomans, but our "home" survives. Our home is more a state of being on the inside than a structure on the outside. When I was divorced I felt I had been pushed out of a plane without a parachute that was bound from east to west coast, but home survived. I carried it with me.

Righting yourself and pushing forward is never easy, yet it seems to happen almost in spite of ourselves. Like Mongolian nomads or turtles we carry our home around, patched or battered though it may be. No matter how dim or devastated home is where others are; sons, family, friends. Home is where we cook dinner not own a TV. For some people home is a spot of concrete, a cardboard box, a sleeping bag tucked inside a garbage sack.

Birds re-nest every year. A babies home is where ever its mother is, not an address, when mom moves so does home.

What we lose in devastation with tornadoes, fire or divorce is things -- stuff -- we don't lose ourselves. We might curl up with depression, distrust or loss of hope, but home is curled up with us. When we emerge so does home.

From the snows of Pakistan to the heat of Haiti people plow through and rebuild sometimes starting with something as fragile as a blade of grass: Wall-E or The Wump World.

Finding your way home is sometimes as easy as standing still.