Home

One of the many reasons I'm a terrible travel blogger is because I have trouble summoning enthusiasm for retelling exciting stories of my travels. It occurs to me that wanting to tell and then telling these stories may actually be the only requirement for having a blog. But I only want to tell about certain things:

How I saw a Georgian man on the metro the other day and thought it was my grandpa - before remembering that my grandpa is no longer alive and that when he was, he was never a silver-haired Georgian man on a metro in Tbilisi. How nothing in the world right now is making me happier than the fruit trees and the hammock under the tin roof outside my host family's house. How I'm terribly happy here right now - yet also how its tinged with a bit of sadness, homesickness, some guilt.

I've never really been homesick before. This blog address - "to have no home" - comes from a quote by the writer Andrew Harvey: "To have no home can be to be at home with all things." So it doesn't mean what it sounds initially. It's not being without a home. It's finding home everywhere, in corners of foreign countries and in people, especially those people, whom you recognize as home. For me, right now, it's being part of the collective life of my host family here. I like it when we sit out under the tin roof, laughing together. I enjoy being part of their family - I like their playfulness, I recognize their disagreements, even though I don't always understand the reason for them, and I appreciate their love for one another.

I've had many different homes: the house in the small town I grew up in, the place my parents still live - what I think of right now as my real home; the home with the guy and the two cats, which became the home I left behind; the home with the little kid I love, where I was home as a nanny; the home that was a tent on a mountain in New Mexico, among many other homes.

Also, my less literal homes: at home in words, stories and books; at home in nature, on mountains, because I love love love being at home on mountains.

Both of my grandparents on my mom's side have died within the last year and this summer we went through boxes of their things - their lives all packed up in too-small boxes. I received a few items: a marathon medal; a troll doll; a map of Norway; my grandma's socks; a picture my grandpa took in Vietnam; just a few of my grandma's paintings; many, many books. What a strange thing. It's not enough, and yet it's what we have. I brought some of it with me to Georgia. The books, mostly, which I'm reading slowly. It's comforting and yet sad. Both at once. Two things simultaneously.

On my first day back in Tbilisi, I walked the streets alone, thinking how familiar the scene had become to me - "Oh look, there's that place where they're doing construction!" and "There's that park and the place where I buy bananas and the stray dogs and the dirt and the unsmiling woman who once gave me a free piece of cake" and "Oh good, more construction!"

It's not quite home, but it's become a piece of my life, a thing that I will carry with me wherever I choose to go from here. It's foreign and - for the next few months - it's home. Two things at once.

Often the best choice you can make is to step away from home. It's part of growing up and it's part of the hero's journey, that call to adventure (I'm thinking of Joseph Campbell here; I love him). And sometimes, home calls you back. I don't yet know what my next step will be, but I'm sensing it may soon become time to start building a more permanent home for myself, although I don't yet know what that might look like.

Still, there are times you can't be home, can't possibly get close enough to those you love, and it is then that you must carry home within you, wherever you go.

Which may be the most important lesson of all: to carry whatever it is you love and hold dear within you like the sacred thing that it is, guarding it as though it's the most important thing in the world, which for all you know it might be.

-Beth