Bloom where you’re planted.

An expression that never set right with me. “Take root where you bloom,” was my retort. To do otherwise was settling. To do otherwise was to throw away the lesson I learned from the hardship of having my regular setting supplanted: not to become oblivious to the larger world.

Other places do seem so cramped up and smothery, but a raft don’t. You feel mighty free and easy and comfortable on a raft. – Huck Finn

This book, more than anything, likely cured me of my grief for familiar places and faces. This jubilantly independent youth provided a new model of peer to relate to, and a new mission. Wanderlust exploded within me so fiercely that a bit of the author’s ghost may have been resurrected during the realignment of my inner universe.

A frog in the well does not know the ocean.
- Japanese proverb

But I know why a fish in the sea keeps to it’s cave. I know the incomparable comfort and security that is found only in the familiar. I want to sail, but a part of me is always keeping an eye out for a port to return to when the wind dies.

My brother has a general sense of where home is. It may flex a bit, but he’s pretty squarely Oregonian. Just as surely as I was Californian when we moved there. By the time I returned to my roots though, I wasn’t any more one than the other. I wasn’t anything but a traveler waiting to see what lies around the next bend.

When I moved to San Francisco I thought I might be going home, even though I’d never been a San Franciscan. And now as I prepare to leave for London, I harbor the same thoughts. Going home. And the certainty of naysayers only strengthens my resolve. What do they know? Not everyone’s the same.

Still, a simple drive into the countryside can rattle my conviction. Because much of what I seek out in the world turns out to be a stone’s throw away from where I am. Beauty so breathtaking it breaks your heart.

As I sat on a beechwood bench on the lip of a sandy cove in the sleepy little town of Jenner I overheard a woman explaining how her parents had come to California for vacation and never left. And for once it’s no wonder why. Here the houses are set into a hillside thick with greenery in every shade and pattern. Here the river meets the ocean, and the vibrant redwoods grow taller than any other tree. Here it smells like sea and earth, and is quiet enough to hear something more than human existence.

Today on Post Secret there was a postcard of California above which was written, “I didn’t want to come home.” And I thought of the woman from yesterday. It was followed by a postcard with the lament, “I wish there was a place where I could feel at home.” And I thought of myself. And then there was an email response:

I spent years feeling like this, wondering if each new place I went would be the home I was looking for. Then I realized that “home” is not something the universe is supposed to give me, a magical place where I’ll suddenly feel I belong. It’s a commitment I make to a place and to a community. I found a place that didn’t feel like home at first, but I decided to make it my home. Every day that I spend here strengthens my commitment. Every day it becomes a little more like “home”.

And I knew that I already knew that this was true.

I never wanted to fall into the trap of assuming that here was the best home because everybody said so when “everybody” was relegated to the residents of one’s home – and for most was the only home they had known. But it’s just as easy to be blind to the value of what you have while you have it. The ideal is to recognize both faults and graces.

The faults of California are that it is overpopulated, overwhelmed with traffic, excessively expensive and dangerously bankrupt.

A short list, but a significant one. I want to live where people are fewer, roads are free-er, politics are not religion, and health and education are not the commodities of the financial elite.

But I do hope that I can find a little beach with redwoods there. And that my family will come to visit.