A few years back I’d gone to spend a month in Europe. It had been an exciting trip and I’d made many friends and visited wonderful places but when I boarded the Alitalia flight back home, there was an incredible childlike ecstasy like nothing I’d ever experienced before. I actually felt like dancing on the plane to the amusement of my co-passengers who had boarded the plane at Milan.
Yes, there’s no place like home! Did you know that the Arctic Tern, that lives about seven degrees south of the North Pole, leaves its home every year and flies all the way to Antarctica and back, some 23,000 miles in all?
The point I’m trying to make is that the bird returns home all of twenty three thousand miles, to its special place near the North Pole! It flies all that distance and returns to just the same spot it once left. I can hardly drive across the city without getting lost — how does it do it? Twenty three thousand miles! But somehow, the Arctic Tern possesses the ability to fly halfway around the globe and return home every year! Wow!
And salmon: I’m sure you know the salmon leaves her little mountain stream as a fingerling and swims, perhaps hundreds of miles, to the ocean where she lives. Then, when it’s time to lay eggs, she swims back to her place of birth. She somehow finds just the right river, and all of the correct tributaries and streams and creeks until she arrives home. It’s the trip of a lifetime — one she may not survive. But she presses on, somehow knowing just the right paths to take along the way.
Like the Arctic Tern, the salmon possesses a built-in ability to find her way home. So, it is with humans. We loaf, we roam, we wander but ultimately return home! But as I think such thoughts, I also know to have such a home to return to we need to invest into it! “Yes Bob, you’re right! Designer tiles and marble flooring, teak beds and fancy upholstery!”
“Nope!” “Then what?” “Love!” “To return home, you need to feel there are loved ones waiting for you, and they’ll only do so, when you’ve invested love into them!” Plain simple love! I know so many wives with husbands abroad, or on oil rigs or ships who tell me, “He’s returning next month and it will be terrible!”
Yes, with heavy hand, and draconian rules we try to ‘set our home in order’ not realizing that there’s a gentle way of doing things. A way called love! So, build love into those walls, those rafters, let it soak into them bath tubs and sink into your fancy tiles and your heart will leap like mine when you board your plane, because then there’s no place like home..!
