Home

“Nature comes home to one most when he is at home; the stranger and traveler finds her a stranger and traveler also. “
- John Burroughs

I am beginning to find that home is a state of mind - a place I have always sought, and sometimes found. Yet, I fear it will always remain one step ahead of me… a level of comfort unattainable. It’s not a place, but rather an amalgam of sound and sense, of feeling and love. I feel it most when my father is on the drums, and I’m on my guitar - or when the smoke wanders over the trees and I rest my head beneath a canopy of pines, freezing - but warm inside. I feel it when the nitric fumes of gunpowder fill my nostrils and I look out at a blazing field as it absorbs the final rays of the sunset. When I shoulder my fishing pole, following the rocky bank home in the cool moonlight… then, I am truly home again.

My recent adventures have led me to lose myself, and find myself all over again… to have lost the warm embrace of my heavenly father, only to fall into those loving arms again… I wandered awhile down a rocky path, but now I’m on a new road - and I know this will be the road that takes me to home… and that’s right where I need to be… I often feared the condemning glances of friends and loved ones, but I have come to realize that those countenances were counterfeit, and half the battles a man must fight in this life are in his head - prayer is the only shelter against falsehood and deceit.