Today marks the sixth month since I got in my car on a rainy Sunday afternoon and started driving east. I made it, the car made it, and mirabile dictu, the car continues to run, bringing me back and forth from the North side to the South side. It’s a vagrant’s life, this commuting, a way of being in a place without really understanding it, as if you could only experience some fantastic animal, like a hippogriff, by taking repeated trips through its alimentary canal. Much better is biking, and on some of the few days I’ve taken off in the past months (where I’ve stayed in the city) I like to tool around, trying to see what occupies the various niches and habitats.

Who, I should say, but the truth is that what the eye sees, roaming around like this, are the artefacts of human existence, the mass effects of human bodies wearing certain clothes, moving in certain patterns, pursuing certain desires, and in such generalities there is no who. I turn my rational mind to the understanding of these ecological realities, but I am only trying to analyze something that operates, on me and on everyone around me, at an animal level. Why does the Clark’s Nutcracker (I hope to see one soon) live up in the Sierra Nevada? Because it understands how to live there; the world yields to its mind there; it finds it possesses the tools for survival, growth, and fruitfulness there.

Am I any different? Only in that I am able to ask myself what my home is, and able to use a much larger and more finely articulated brain to understand it. I’m not restricted to subalpine forest (unfortunately, perhaps), or to any place at all, but this flexibility comes at the price of a need for complexity, of not being home except in some relation to the world that is dispersed, difficult, and often invisible.

I am tempted to wonder, sometimes, what would have happened if I had just gotten on Interstate 80 and driven straight out here. If I had not seen Death Valley in spring, or the cloud of snow geese above the Owens Valley, or the utterly alien landscape of southern Utah. I could not now long for them, it is true–I would feel less as though I had caught myself on some sharp peak and left behind some important part of my guts–but if is a child’s world (to quote Gene Wolfe), and I might as well ask myself even more ridiculous questions, about women, about friends, about certain books, pieces of music. All the things that are no longer things to me, that I understand not in the sense that I can give account for them, but in the sense that the nutcracker understands his home.

So perhaps if has its uses, if one remains thankful. But it is not enough. For one thing, it’s not enough to say “home is everywhere,” and still go about in fear. And the other, which perhaps only becomes difficult once the first lesson is learned, is that the heart continues to long, and that must not be ignored.

Have I mentioned how good it is to be able to work toward something you want greatly?

(cdm | ProgressReport)