They say you can’t go home

They say you can't go home

Our thoughts at times develop into strings of thought which might last for a few moments, days or weeks allowing our self at that time a period of learning through reflection and resolution. My own thoughts many times this summer have drifted to a childhood home in Northeast Iowa known as Washburn. Hamlet of 100 homes built post World War II, although this town sat in a state of being unincorporated after building the quiet what is now considered a suburb of Waterloo was home. Mirada Lambert of late has released a song "The House That Built Me" and the memories of returning in the mind or physical to that one place where childhood seemed like an eternity of endless days of play, learning, yet not removed from a world which would lie outside childhood in the years to come.

 

A childhood parameter of six blocks, elementary school, couple of churches, tavern, post office, grocery and memories for a lifetime and where love began and pain was realized. Morning coffee gatherings in following my mother to the destination house of the day where all friends would meet in housedresses and talk about life, town, God and vent! Being the youngest of five children those times were spent listening in the confines of a kitchen until I could break lose to the outdoors wondering how they could find so much to talk about at the beginning of each day in such a small little town, though they did in repetition for years to come. A town where alliances were formed in circles which lasted the lifetimes of my parents and a place where my love of large dogs and horses were found in a collie/Labrador mix names Duke and a welsh pony known as Scout, a paint with attitude and a rider to match without nonsense though deeply loved. Looking back my friendships were formed in a nucleus from those who held the same interests. Randy and Cindy were my riding buddies, mornings filled with looking for each other and at times riding together and times alone where town parameters were ignored and our four legged transportation would take us far beyond the town we called home. More than once pulling a pony out of a mud of a pond or finding open fences where pastures would become runways free to fly in and deep drainage ditches the roller coasters of free flight on a horse. Duke belonged to my oldest brother technically though with all his teenage life going one I could claim Duke days on end. He has the deep red fur of the collie, long and pretty when he would run keeping up with Scout and I and resting while we rested in grass at times much taller than he was, being chained or confined was not part of Dukes life during those moments of his life. He was free and always returned when the night came once again. The Adams boy who was the age of my brother seemed to have a desire to get that one shot at Duke with a BB gun, although we outran him many times the night did come when Duke came home with his head pierced with a BB. Though it never slowed him down he became more vigilant when passing the house on Third Street of the Adams family.

 

Our town was not free of all the ugliness of the outside world either, learning early the traits of the family next door with an alcoholic father and a mother's perseverance to better their lives. We knew the house where incest lived, the pedophile in another, the pain of Johnny's Rendons family when he was killed by a sniper in Vietnam, a young teenage girl dying of brain cancer behind another door, the night a lady on the next street over put a gun to her stomach in attempting suicide and listening to the horror of pain in my mother's friends voice the day of her ten years old funeral after being killed by a drunk driver leaving the tavern. Although the aspects of the outside world to be learned more clearly in years to come were present they were minute in the detour of choices of days being free to play through childhood. I have thought lately about writing a letter to the address of childhood in the home Dad built returning from the war and asking if I could visit the old house one more time, as of now I have not done so. Do I really choose to join those days of another time with the vision of today or is it needed? Would I really be going home? No, home has never been left to another location – I have carried home with me throughout my life. Home is the heart and memories we hold in all existence, longed for without being distant if we allow home to surface again in thought. In later years of my mothers life when she would dream she remarked how her dreams once again took her to that time and space and for just a time being of another dimension again in happiness. Dad once again being alive in her world and her children all being the individuals they were. She said the dreams were not of the scenarios of life she remembered but always new daily adventures.

 

In the thought pattern of a quantum existence this is possible and real without linear time or space of distance, only returning and living in many moments considered eternity at the same time. Often returning in thought or the dream state to the realization nothing has passed – we have only passed from moment to memory. A place where life still exists with Duke, Scout and all my family and friends dimensionally different than what I consider home now, the home of heart and soul and travel of the great mind of source and spirit which we are. They say you can't go home again, true; you never left and only your choice of visiting once again the homes of the heart through you freedom of travel into the super-conscious state of being. Have you gone home lately to the core of your peace, book a ticket and enjoy the adventure which awaits you, it is not beyond a lifetime in review, only a choosing to return.