This is my fourth week living in a permaculture community on the Island of Skye. I’ve been fixing things up around the place, felling a tree or two, learning nature observation practices, and laughing at the people here who think 70F (21C) is hot. They laugh at me for gaping in wonder at the sky every time it rains, which is often. I really like it here.
My plan is to stay here till sometime in September or early October. After one or two stops in the UK, I'll make my way towards the Canary Islands. Ideally I'll be on a boat for much of that, but I might have to overland back to Europe to catch up to one. Then by December I'll make the Atlantic passage and, depending on the boat(s), get to either South or North America. Then, home, by January or maybe by April.
I've never experienced homesickness, possibly because I've never had a sense of any place being my home. Now that I've committed to the family land being my home, I very much have a sense of it, and what I can only describe as a longing for it. It feels very far away. Six to nine months away. Thousands of miles traveling at 10 or so knots away.
Removing flying from my options makes the world feel different. It doesn't occur to me that I could touch down at LAX or SFO in two or three days, if I wanted to. What I mean is that I don't sense home as being three days away, even though technically it is.
I sense that home is six months away at the bare earliest. That I'm not even halfway there yet. And I have the sense that I'm going to have to do something scary, challenging, that I've never done before, something much harder than enduring security lines and customs, in order to get there. Some days I can’t stand not being there right now.
And ...
That's wonderful. I experience it as something wonderful. I'm full of this deep yearning for a bit of land out in the desert that's got the blood and sweat of my family in it and if it were only three days away I wouldn't have this powerful of a feeling for it. I wouldn't realize how much I cared about it because it'd have always been right there, within easy reach, like everything else in the world of consumer capitalism if you're born into the privilege of directing thousands of energy slaves at your whim.
They say that things worth having are worth fighting for. I'm realizing the two-sideness to that, the way in which fighting for the thing creates and amplifies the sense of it being worth having. After this, home will not just be some gift of my circumstances that I accepted easy access to. It won’t even be just something that I’ve put thousands of hours of direct work and effort into from the time I was thirteen. It will be a thing that I literally crossed an ocean for. Something I endured much for.
Putting my bare feet into the hot gritty sand of home will represent not my ability to book a flight on my phone and have the funds and proper paperwork in order, but my ability to choose to commit to something grander than what is expected of me, and to stick to it, and to stand watch under the crushing expanse of stars from horizon to horizon.