Finding Our Way Home

We were not meant to live in cities, in climates that our naked bodies are not suited to, in lands where finding wild and healthy food isn’t easy and delightful. We are creatures of the jungle. There is no room for us now, in the jungle, and we have forgotten how to live there anyway. And within a few decades the jungle will all be gone in any case. If we long for that home we will do so in vain.

A couple of years ago I wrote a passage, from the perspective of a duck, that I still get comments on from time to time:

When I wrote this, I had been sitting quietly at the edge of my wetland home, watching the ducks and imagining what they could say to me if only I understood their language. And I began feeling ‘homesick’. Not the nostalgia for the sanitized, idealized past, in the place I grew up. Not the insecure yearning for a simpler, secure, responsibility-free existence. Rather, a longing for a place I had never known, calling to me.

My current home is a lovely place, one that I leave as rarely as possible and spend as much time as possible exploring and learning more about. It is my connection to this current home that allows me to hear the call of my true home, in some faraway jungle that exists only in my imagination and in my bones and in my genetic code, my intuition. I can only describe it as a joyful ache, because the mere thought of it, and what I, and others for whom it is also home and with whom I am meant to be living, would be doing there, if only we could make our way forward to that place, makes me smile.

I am very content with my current home. It is the best home that one could hope to find in this terrible, crowded modern world. It has allowed me to discover a great deal about myself and what it means to be human, and alive. And it has enabled me to Let-Myself-Change. But it is not my true home, and much of the learning I ache for is not possible here or anyplace that is left for humans to choose to live.

This is what makes me despair most about our future. With all the challenges we face in this century, we are not very well equipped to know what we must do, because we are so disconnected from the only place, our true home, from which such knowledge can come. We can, of course, adapt to any place, learn to call any place home; that is the great strength of our species. But in that adaptation so much learning and knowledge and capacity is inevitably lost. Even indigenous peoples — who appreciate this far more than most, and more than I, lucky as I am to have found a wonderful half-way surrogate home — cannot really know what must be done. And as they, and we, become further displaced, again and again, by what we strangely call ëprogressí, that knowledge fades even further from our grasp. We may call these astonishing places ëhomeí, but we do not belong here.

Most of the very bright people I know have spent all their lives in cities, and when I speak to them about this it is as if I were speaking a foreign language. They have no idea what I mean. Soon, this will be true for all of us. We will have such knowledge as the world has never seen or imagined.

But it will not be the knowledge we need to be human, to be who we really are. We will have lost the final compass that could have shown us, at last, theway home.