240601 - Welcome Home

3 days ago I landed in Sweden. 14 months, or 421 days, after departure, I return. The policewoman at the passcontrol in the airport greets me: “Welcome home.” Her words bring a puzzled look onto my face. Is that where I am? I return, but it is neither I who left nor the place I departed from. My memories have been overflowing since I got here; places and people I know from my past greeting me like ephemeral ghosts from an age long-forgotten. Only, I realize, it is not they who are out-of-place. I am the ghost. A friend calls me unexpectedly on the phone. “Welcome home”, he says. “It’s like you were dead for a year. How is it to be back?” A continous question, echoing from the fabric of space-time itself. Indeed, space and time is that which seems to be breaking apart, and in their place unreality stares me in the face. More than anything, the attachments that used to define home for me are missing. “Home is where my bag is”, Hanna used to say. Now, for the first time in a long time, my bag is not with me. Nonetheless, home is with me. It resides in my heart, in my lungs, in the electric buzzing traveling up my spine as I sit down for my first sitting of the day. Home is the nurtured space of reflexive sensitivity I value above all else. The gospel I used to spend my free-time deciphering is revealed through practice in their physical form. I am, more than anything, in memory-land. This is where my past resides. I also feel exalted to Paradise by the name of Eden. It is certainly abundance unknown. As I write this I’m sitting in a large, green, private, garden, in a comfortable 20-something degrees and undreamed-of amounts of fresh air. Dragonflies are swishing by, birds playing in the sky, and I’m looking out over a field of various vegetables, berries, and other edibles that my mom spends so much of her time cultivating, slowly growing. It’s where I grew up, yet its richness, its utter abundance, is foreign, is completely new. I know, deep in my heart, that I am not “home”. I have returned, only on the surface, yet I reside somewhere else. My journey continues, here, just the same. 14 months ago, a 21-year old boy with grandiose and naive dreams flew away from everything he knew to begin his life anew. He knew more than he will ever understand. He never came back.