It is long, I find, since my thoughts have been used to spilling themselves here. It is not that they have ceased to ramble; they have not mended their habits so much as that, nor have they yet scrounged up the decency to feel shame over their wandering ways. It is only that my fingers have been too much entangled in other matters to write them, and my heart too full of many things to muddle them out into their proper place in the world.
Yet the world itself has not felt to be in its proper place, these days. Or perhaps it is I who am out of place; caught up in the puppet-strings of a story that seems somehow unfamiliar to me, though it is a story I have always presumed to call my own.
(...Or something vaguely poetic like that, which was meant to sound a good deal less morbid and a great deal more cohesive than it managed to. If ever Eeyore and I should make one anothers' acquaintance, we shall have a grand party together; except that I shall be too incoherent for him to understand, and I fear his hut of sticks may not be big enough to fit the both of us. We shall have to content ourselves with a particularly ragged umbrella to sit beneath, and watch the rain fall together. )
And yet....
Perhaps it is Eeyore, with his ever-tumbling pile of sticks, that would best understand me after all. It is not that I am so very gloomy; though it is in my nature to cling to sadder things. It is only that I have, truly, come to the end of something, and it is not a thing that I would not ever have believed myself willing to part with.
I have come to the end of home.
Perhaps the most ardent expression that has found its way to these blog-pages is a longing for Home. I have always known, you see, that I do not belong here--neither do you, if your heart is caught up in the same place as my own--and the truth of that, like nothing else, has the capacity to strike joy and pain and hope and longing in a single stabbing of itself into your heart. Yet it seems I have never known it fully: I have only ever seen it for a moment, embracing it in the shadow of some great farewell, or some glimpse of beauty I cannot keep yet long to cling to. But always there has been a place, a person, a feeling, an experience; something on earth that I am longing for, something beautiful enough for me to have likened eternity, in some way, to it. And as I long for that which has made me most at home here, I come to yearn for the time when the comfort of feeling at home is measured by the Infinite and Eternal.
Yet there comes a time when all that you have sought for, and all you have likened to Belonging is met with at last; and as you gather it to yourself with open arms, you realize suddenly, joltingly--
It still isn't Home.
It is a funny thing, reaching that place--
You may have known, all along, that it would come.
But somewhere between knowing and experience,
you come to find that--though you were waiting for it--
you didn't realize it would hurt so much.
It is a difficult thing, to wander. To lay your head on a pillow in that place you hold closest to your heart, and realize that however many years and memories have bound you there, you do not wholly belong. And the truth cuts deeper still when you come to understand that no one and nowhere on this earth can make you belong.
And yet there is a truth, which sometimes deepens the loneliness's sting, and sometimes dissolves it, and more often than either requires a great deal of thinking over before one can really understand how to feel about it. It is this: that we are not meant to belong--any more than the stars belong in the shadows, or the pillow I rest my head upon tonight will not burn and perish and fade in the blazing day of Eternity (if not sooner; which, flammability considered, is not altogether improbable). Why should I care if it is my own? It will fade. Why should I mind if my home is no longer mine? It never has been; it was only ever a shell to shelter in, and it too shall fade. All of these shadows will fade with the land that has wrought them, the death of all that must die to give birth to something New.
And yet, it is not that it doesn't matter. It is only that I have found something that matters far, far more. I have learned that the ties that have claimed us for Heaven are stronger--thank God, they are stronger!--than the chains that bind us to the shadows. For once I was theirs; yes, once I belonged to the shadows. Yet it was through those days that I came to know something of great importance.
I learned that a certain gently-sought thing, called Joy, was never found in belonging--
it was found in being set free.
And I am not so homeless as the one who built Heaven and left it,
trading stars for shadows and perfection for scars.
My freedom is in His wandering,
my rest in His stillness toward death,
my home in the lostness He suffered to find me.
Yet perhaps, somehow,
you still believe in my right to complain?
No. I think--
I really do--
that perhaps,
that perhaps,
I am not so very homeless after all.
