Well, so much for 'restarting' my blog! Many apologies for the erratic posts, but the last month has been crazy.
It started with a whirlwind goodbye to a very close friend I made last semester at Penn. You would leave in the midst of final exams, wouldn't you? Typical finance major.
Then I found myself shipped off to the land of whiskey and kilts to spend ten delicious days with two of my favorite people on the planet. We sunbathed (!!), ate cake, drank cider, and made friends with some dashing Greek philosophers ;) Oh, and I became a member of the National Library of Scotland, where I spent many an hour in the Special Collections Reading Room, pouring over early 19th century illustrated copies of Shakespeare. English honors, here I come!
Over I popped, afterward, for a quick jaunt in Italia, where several pizzas and cups of gelato found their way to my belly in the company of someone truly amazing. Thank you, by the way. For everything.
Now, I'm living in New York. La grande mela, if you will. From my room on the seventh floor of an apartment building guarding the East River I can hear the pattering of rain and the hum of insistent traffic beneath my rickety window, overlooking the buzzing calm of midtown Manhattan. I just returned home from a full, satisfying day of work and delicious cocktails with one of my best, best friends. Life is good.
All this traveling, this constant change of scenery and perspective and paradigm, though, is beginning to make me wonder about the importance of place. Ought we as humans be rooted in a physical location, a geographic certainty that will not waver with the fickleness and broken promises of life? (I think Titus knows what I'm talking about here.) Or is it better, more optimistic, safer in some ways, to be a child of the wind and let it drift us from city to city, from a small college campus to a cabin by a distant lake? If change is home, then none of us have moved out of our parents' basements. There's some comfort in that idea.
Mom thinks I have a gypsy spirit, but I'm not so sure. Up to now, I've felt that home is wherever my people are. York, Philadelphia, Edinburgh, even Manhattan on a drizzly Monday night -- I've shared these places with my family and friends, the family I get to choose. And in those moments, each of these cities has felt like home.
A boy once asked me where my home was, and I said, "Wherever you are." At the time, I meant it. But when he left, I felt exiled, locked out of my safest place, and anyone who has felt this way can probably agree - I never want to feel that way again.
So, part of me feels a longing for a piece of earth to call my own. A sliver of land, in the shape of a town or river or stretch of hillside, that won't disappear. Stability and certainty -- the things humans crave and cannot, it seems, obtain. Or, maybe, as Democritus seems to imply in yet another quotation I've borrowed for this post's title, home is within. Perhaps it's a place of clarity and awareness residing in each of us that can be tended and guarded and will flourish with the proper patience and care.
Well, we'll see. The yoga studio next to my building is offering a two-week unlimited pass this month that just might help me attend to this query. Haha!
Alright, philosophers, off to bed I go. I think I'll snuggle up with some Steinbeck again this evening.
Hugs from Murray Hill --
L
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