There’s No Place Like Home

I was ten years old when I took my first airplane ride. It was on a 747 from Cleveland to Chicago. I flew with my two brothers and my uncle, switching planes at O’Hare to get into Des Moines that summer.When we arrived the Iowa corn was as high as an elephant’s eye and dirt roads stretched to the horizon in every direction.

Iowa meant family and farmland and 4th of July parades with our cousins. Grandma’s white farmhouse was home to me as much as the yellow Ohio kitchen where we had eaten breakfast that morning. A similar purple lilac bush was blooming just outside the window.

But even though it was a second home to me, it was still scary to journey that far.

If I recall correctly my brother needed an airsickness bag. But not me. I opened the foil pouch of pretzels and peeked through the clouds below at the patchwork of land and I felt brave and adventurous. The stewardess gave me little silver wings and I pressed them onto my white eyelet shirt. From that moment on there was no denying it: I loved to travel. I loved busy airports where people beamed with excitement or slumped weary from their journey. I loved views from a different perspective: out a window on a plane, on a back road in the Midwest, from a lighthouse on the ocean, a kayak on a lake, at the foothills of wine country, or atop an Alaskan waterfall.

There is so very much to see in this big, vast world.

Nearly two decades later, I was 25 and on my honeymoon I kissed a dolphin in Key Largo. We snorkeled on a coral reef five miles off shore and it was one of the most beautiful things I have ever seen.

And it terrified me.

I remember looking out into the deep blue ocean underwater through my goggles and being afraid of the unknown. Something in the way the reef just dropped off and the water darkened. There was so much I couldn’t see out there. I wanted to go back to land where things were familiar. Back to solid ground. Back home.

I still kinda feel that way, if I’m honest.

The truth about traveling is that when we do we get away from the mundane. We find those we love on a country road and hug them. We peer out from the window seat with expectation. We look at life differently. Sometimes we find ourselves. Sometimes we lose ourselves for awhile. Sometimes it’s scary, and sometimes it awakens the brave parts in us.

The more I travel the more I learn that the beauty of it all is really in the eye of the beholder.
We see beauty where we travel because we are looking.

We are aware and alive and present and available.

The real truth is that we can live every day right where we are with eyes of a tourist.

Eyes that look for the light of the moon from where we stand, or the flower that blooms in our own backyard. We can be open to discovering something new in our spouse or our children or in ourselves.
We just have to look.  And if we look hard enough it’s pretty clear: there’s no place like home.

P.S. Emily Wierenga has written a beautiful travel memoir called Atlas Girl. It’s been my favorite summer read.
I had the chance to interview Emily recently at Outside the City Gate and we’ll share her interview soon.

Emily T. Wierenga, award-winning journalist and author of 4 books,has released her first memoir, Atlas Girl: Finding Home in the Last Place I Thought to Look.

They say the book is like “Girl Meets God” meets “Wild” meets “Eat, Pray, Love.”I say the book is an inspiring, and a beautiful, honest look at searching for HOME.

Grab a copy here.

Edited with BlogPad Pro