Or was it that, having lived in many different countries as a consequence of teaching English as a foreign language, I had, in the spirit of the German cobbler Jakob Boehm, gone through hell (I have lived in some of the most bleak places on the planet, notably, Libya, Qatar, and Saudi Arabia, and a winter in Atyrau in Kazakhstan!!] and now saw heaven in the form of the bucolic and pastoral shires of rolling farm and woodland?
Both are valid as answers. Yet, I was also interested in the idea of home, not as a construct, but as a natural process, more verb than noun. What is home (in the large, open-ended sense), and what does it mean 'to home'.
The French philosopher Gilles Deleuze caught my attention when he spoke of the 'sacred right of migration' and I wondered how we were different (if at all) from the birds and the animals at large, and their 'home'. Frugality, I had worked out, springs from flowing. Flowering (humans are plants after all!) is a function of this flowing - a natural flow that is not predicated upon the non-essential, but on the hyper-organic energization of the animal being.
And then, I realized, after watching a buzzard above the braes, that that was what I was doing...!
I was, fundamentally, patrolling my home range. A home range that was essentially an integral part of who I was. After all, organism and environment are not separate.
Belonging is a matter of knowing place. To know place is to belong. And I'm not just talking about where the local offy is. It's a matter of seeing yourself through other forms. Whether it be rivers or hills, coastlines or seas, outwith the coagulated and incestuous identity that man has made for himself.
In all parts of Nature, there is a fundamental flow that conjoins you with her. I guess then I cycle to flow, and to home.
Heimat and habitat, like space and peace, are intimately related.
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