HOME AGAIN...

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PROXIMITY

I was thinking about how I define myself
and it occurred to me that at any given moment
I know who I am by knowing where I am
and by knowing where I am at the moment
in relation to other specific places on earth
and what each place is now and was to me.

You take us off on a tangent that makes odd sense
because we have been together in Kota Kinabalu
and Smolensk with stops in between at Machu Piccu
and La Paz before going on to Marmaris and Barcelona.
Do you think we have become different after each place,
something other than what we were before...what?

If religions make sense at all, it must come from knowing
who we are in relation to everything else we have seen
and felt and heard and loved in all the places where
moving on and on and on through the journey that life is
we develop a sense of our place in our own little space
and what it means to be there and not somewhere else.

Sounds like a Hindu idea... or maybe a Buddhist thing.
You hold onto the possibility that some Creator
is perhaps waiting to be encountered at the next place,
with solid evidence that it all makes sense in a cosmic way.
That’s all you want anyway, isn’t it? ...for it to make sense?
You want reliable markers that you are in the right place?

A space shuttle from our small place in the universe
swooshed into a loop around the earth and sped along
to dock with a space station fixed in predictable orbit,
and I wondered when I saw on television it’s fiery thrust
how it is possible that where it’s going out there someplace
in nothingness,the vacuum of space, is a place, a place.

Perhaps... perhaps... but not certainly sure out there
somewhere...somewhere out there in the great wherever
some creature like us evolved enough to ponder place
wanders in a life orbit not unlike the only one we know
and contemplates the possibility that teases us
with thoughts that someone else is out there wondering.

Coming home from a journey with strangers to a place
where my only motive for being there was to be there
and knowing that all of us would scatter to other places
after we got to the place the itinerary indicated last day,
knowing I would never see them again, ever again...
was there any meaning at all in our having been there.

Is home a place or a state of mind or both or neither?
The sad woman begging for change on the street
and the cabbie transported from his home in Pakistan
and our friends coming home from “back East” and...
and...and... all the other people going everywhere 
know who they are by knowing where they are?

From Vancouver to Seattle to Oakland to San Diego...