Home where ever I am in the world

Essayist, poet and novelist, Robert Louis Stevenson wrote, "Don't judge each day by the harvest you reap, but by the seeds you plant."

This morning, I received a call from my eldest daughter, Alexis, in Thailand. She's on the final two days of her trip. Getting ready to come home. Getting ready to keep travelling.

"I want to come home," she said. "But I want to get travelling again as soon as I'm back."

It's four months since she left to travel through Australia, New Zealand and Thailand. In her travels she has come to the realization that it's a great big world out there. So much to see. So much to do.

It is a big world. And there are lots of sights to see, lots of experiences to live. The day isn't judged on where we've been. It's measured in the steps we take, the ideas we expand upon, the seeds of hope, of courage, of possibilities we plant.

The journey is life. The destination, anywhere in the world we are.

When I was in my twenties, I travelled from Germany, into Austria, northern Italy through the then Yugoslavia, over the top of Albania, into Greece. The journey was an exciting adventure, a chance to 'see' the world through different glasses. We were tourists, but we had a place of residence on an island. A professor at the university had loaned my friend and me his home near Yaltra for a couple of months. I remember feeling so far from home. So far from life as I knew it.

Under the hot Aegean sun, cicadas rattled their tiny wings, the metallic noise of their vibrations filling the air with clatter. Olive trees shimmered in silvery hues in the sunlight. The land was parched and dusty. The air filled with the scent of lemon and jasmine. Heady. Musky. Ripe.

One day, I drove around the island by myself. I felt apart. Foreign. Different. I parked my little red mini at the edge of a small town and stepped out onto the dusty road. Whitewashed houses lined the street, marching down the hillside to the sea below. The sky soared into blue infinity above me. Sparkling water stretched out to the horizon, glistening under the sun.

It was hot. Black clad women sat on doorsteps. Their scarves firmly tied at the base of their necks. Children played on the street. It was safe to be there in a town of few cars. In a place where electricity had finally reached across the strait only a few years before.

As I walked into town, I searched my mind for the few Greek phrases I'd learned. Kali merra. Good-morning. Kali spera. Good evening. Piccolo. Little. There were others but in the intervening years they have faded from memory.

The memory of one woman I met has never faded.

She sat on her front step. A large metal bowl filled with potatoes by her side. Deftly wielding a paring knife, she peeled the potatoes and dropped them into another metal bowl filled with water.

She watched me approach. I smiled. Nodded my head. She nodded back, the dark pools of her eyes shining from amidst the wrinkles lining her face. I wondered who she was. I wondered if she'd sat on that step all her life. I wondered if she'd had dreams. Had she ever moved off the stoop? Left her village? Had she ever seen the world?

"Nice day out today," she said as I walked past. There was a strong Brooklyn accent to her voice. I remembered a friend in Germany who spoke English with a Texan twang. He'd learned it from a Texan girlfriend years before.

I stopped. Surprised. I turned back to look at her.

"Yes. It is."

"You should be wearing a hat," she said, using her paring knife to motion towards my head. "Sun's hot."

"Oh." I paused. "You speak English." Sometimes, I surprise even myself with the obvious.

"Yeah. Lived in New York for thirty years. I've come home to die. It's where I belong."

She motioned to the step beside her. "Sit down. Have a chat. I don't get much chance to speak English these days."

I sat and we chatted. She told me of her work in New York for 'some of those artsy farsty people'. "They were always throwing parties," she said. "More money than common sense." She sighed. "My son's are still there." Silence. She grimaced, but said no more about her sons. "My daughter is here. I come home to her. Daughters are a mother's gift."

I asked her about her village. It was the town she was born in. The town she had left as a young bride when her husband uprooted the family to plant them on foreign soils. She told me about the arrival of electricity. Of the few phones in the village. Of the daughters and sons moving away, just like she had. Of the old people coming home. Just like she had.

"New York was never home," she told me. "This is my home. This is where my heart has always been." She lifted her paring knife again and pointed to the white washed buildings. The sea beyond. The olive trees. The flowering lemon branches. The red flowers in painted pots. The blue shutters on open windows. "It doesn't matter where we go, we always have to come home to where our heart belongs."

I haven't thought about that woman's words in a long time. But talking to my daughter this morning, reading her blog, I am reminded of the power of the heart's yearning to come home no matter where in the world we are.

Alexis has been around the world and now she comes home. I have travelled to far away places and found my home where I belong, right where I am at.

In our journeys, we encounter adventure and people and sights and sounds we've never before experienced. We find stories to tell and tales yet to unfold. We see possibilities and impossibilities. And through it all, we travel into the heart of who we are when we're alone on this lonely planet looking for answers that were always there inside us. Where ever we are in the world, we can always be home when our hearts are full and we are at peace with ourselves.

A wise old woman sitting on a stoop in a foreign land told me that long ago. She had travelled the world to find herself once again, home where she belonged.

The question is: Where does your journey take you? Where are you at home?