Humans migrate everywhere, and sometimes we seek to return “home”
Growing up listening to stories of so-and-so moving back to their place of origin after many years, even decades, of living elsewhere struck me as odd. Why in the world would anyone who moved away to where they wanted to live ever want to move back to their land of birth? After all, such people have put down new roots, mined and developed new career and lifestyle opportunities, and networked themselves into new communities. Why would they return to a place where everyone they knew from their youth was old, dead, or had themselves also relocated to new places? Some people do move later in life, but not to return to place of origin but to be closer to their adult children and grandchildren. Ironically, the kids sometimes end up if not in the old homeplace at least in an area closer to it than otherwise.
After all, as the late Thomas Wolfe once pointed out, “You can’t go home again.” He alludes to the many changes and transformations in one’s self, in other people, and to home itself. What was home is no more even if it looks the same from a distance. Everything has changed even if it seems nothing truly has shifted one way or another. Given enough time, people die, more are born, civilizations rise and fall, and continents pull apart to slide across the planet or back beneath changing seas.
Humans and related hominin species have migrated around the planet for ages. We still are, and now we look up into Outer Space for where to go next. We’ve crossed oceans and continents, explored remote rivers and settled islands far from anywhere else. We’ve gone to the deepest part of the ocean, contemplate underwater bases and cities, climbed the highest mountain peaks, walked upon the Moon, and sent spacecraft beyond our solar system. We want to go go go, yes, we do. And yet, at some point, many of those who can want to return to where they grew up. Even in science fiction, Star Trek’s Jean-Luc Picard, obsessed with exploring new worlds and vanished civilizations, yearns to return home from the stars to a serene retirement in the vineyards of his native France. I’ve had relatives on both sides who moved away to live in much more exciting places end up returning to the old, boring, and yet pretty homeplace.
I feel it, too, I feel the pull back to origins. Been away over three decades, and to my own surprise, The Pull is real. I feel it. Unable to explain it except to acknowledge the pull to return exists within me. A primal force pulls me and pushes me all at once as if home has its own gravity. This primal force is powerful. Sometimes it’s a return home to the grave, to be closer to one’s dead.
Doesn’t mean I will.
William Dudley Bass
Thursday 30 May 2024
Monday 29 July 2024
Shoreline/Seattle, Washington
Cascadia
USA
Earth
Copyright © 2024 by William Dudley Bass. All Rights Reserved by the Author & his Descendants until we Humans establish Wise Stewardship over and for our Earth and Solarian Commons. Thank you.