When I was around 4 years old one of little my friends decided to run away. I went with her to the next block, where we stopped to look at the seashells that were embedded in the sidewalk. As I was always more connected to my appetite than to adventure, we looked in her suitcase and found out she hadn't brought any food, only a couple of dolls. I decided to go home. She followed me.
As we came around the corner, my mother was waiting. I told her, "Dina ran away, and I didn't want her to be alone."
Her mother came outside when we walked to their front door. My mother said, "Keep an eye on your kids. They don't know how to get home when they run away."
I thought that meant that Dina should learn her street address and phone number. My mother likely meant that the younger mother should keep closer to her children, and perhaps take a turn or two around the block so those children would learn the physical characteristics and placement of the house where they lived. It made sense to me even at that age. My mother took my sister and me on long walks around our little subdivision. We would push up hills and "find" our distinctive street looking through (but never walking in) the gardens of people we never met. We observed boundaries; counted windows, named colors and textures. We named its intersections and courts, and generally traveled a circular route back home, to our little duplex. It would be years before I understood that home is anywhere I go, when I travel with LOVE.
Most of us mark progress and position in our lives. We adopt a location that intersects with a job, a view, an opportunity. We fill spaces with styles and, as our intersections shift, we release, refurbish, remove, and restock those spaces. Intermittently, we explore new paths, new perspectives, new adventures. Some of those lead us to new opportunities and spaces, brighter kitchens, new menus, larger vocabularies, and many of them remind us that we long to return home. "Home is where the heart is" becomes more about relationship. Whether our relationship is with friends, family, pets, neighbors, or colleagues, we revel in knowing our place is with those we love and who love us. Some of us expand those relationships and sustain them; others of us travel through them keeping relationships close in memory when circumstances impose distance. Some of us long for deeper relationship, and inevitably we are led within our being. Whether we call ourselves mystics, thinkers, introverts, seekers, skeptics, or believers we come to believe that our heartfelt, home-based relationships are generating LOVE. We expand Love for ourselves, for others, for all life, with ALL that is (chemical, electrical, seen, unseen, possible, imagined, and concrete). Our home is Love. Wherever we are, Love moves with us, among us, and through us. We learn, there is no place like home. Love is Home, here, now.