Epiphany has been on my mind of course. It’s that season, after all - at least the part of the season that has occupied my thoughts. The Christian calendar does a kind of time warp with Epiphany, commencing with the visit of the magi and their curious gifts before jetting ahead to the baptism of Jesus. Not a baptism of the infant Jesus; no, the adult Jesus, at the hands of his cousin John. Like I said: time travel.
But it’s the story of the magi that continues to intrigue me, focusing on the evocative observation that, having done what they set out to do, and having been warned in a dream, they “returned home by another way.”
I’ve reflected a lot, in recent years, about this notion of “home” - most cogently in my memoir that borrowed its name from this biblical story. Home by Another Way: Harvesting Taproot’s Wisdom. In that book I focus particularly on our surprising move from the city to the farmstead where we continue to live and work and thrive now 12 years after the movers unloaded the last of the furniture and we first sunk a seed in the new garden. That two of us city kids with advanced degrees and busy “indoor” professions would wind up here, doing this, can only be described as “another way”.
But it’s more than that. A native Texan, it never crossed my mind that home, for me, would come to mean Iowa as it has for the past 31years. Graduating from seminary in my mid-20’s, married and with a child, my sense was that my path was pretty well charted. I knew where “home” was and how to get there. Twenty years later that road had detoured sharply due to the “bridge out” of a divorce, years of grieving and solitude, and eventual remarriage which became a flourishing, feeding garden of still another sort. Home became a reality I never imagined, but knew in my bones to be my place of rest.
Professionally I could tell a similar story. Steward of a farmstead wasn’t anything that appeared on a childhood list of “what I want to be when I grow up.” It isn’t anything my schooling prepared me for or for which my particular gifts fit me. And yet here I am: home, in every way that makes sense to me; more settled, alive, generative, animated and whole than perhaps I ever have. Having traveled a path I never charted, and having arrived at a “place” I had never been nor conceived but knew almost immediately to be home.
The writer Parker Palmer muses extensively about the importance of wholeness - the integration of inner self and outer expression and pursuits. I think of it as a kind of existential sweet spot. It may not be a location that can be pinned on a map, but that wholeness is a kind of “home” as well.
More then, than a functional location - merely the place where I receive my mail and plug in my car; more than a convenient proximity to work. Home is something both concrete and mystically intangible. A “state” of being, then, as well as a “place” of being. Who and where one belongs. And having found oneself there - however surprising - to pronounce it “good”.
There is more to “home”, I’m confident, than I have explored; more “ways” there than I have yet traveled.
In 1964, Supreme Court Justice Potter Stewart famously observed in an opinion about obscenity that he may not be able define it, but “I know it when I see it.” Perhaps he borrowed the idea from the great fictional detective Sherlock Holmes when he commented in The Hound of the Baskervilles on the virtues of a particular portrait, “I know beauty when I see it.”
Perhaps, then, that’s the most we can finally say about: we know it when we arrive there, even if we’ve never been there before, and by whatever alternative routes led us there. Home, perhaps, by another name as well as by another way.
Home. The wholeness, the goodness, the centeredness that is home.
A Gentle Postscript:
My other blog, Taproot Garden, can now be found on The Substack platform. I invite you to subscribe to it and read it there at: Substack.com/@taprootgarden
