I remember when I drove east on a winding road through the countryside from Terra Haute to Bloomington, and the strangest feeling enveloped me. I felt like I was “coming home.” This feeling was utterly new to me. In my 60 years, I had simply never encountered such a feeling, living instead, as a bird on a tree, liable to fly off at any moment.

Similarly, when Coming Back Home in terms of the first and only (unless I live twice as long as now: joke?) Uranus Return, while nearing my 84th birthday: the road has felt and still feels winding; I never know what’s just around the next corner; and the corners are not just 90° turns, they are infinitesimal, magical, subtle. A one degree difference makes all the difference! Have you noticed? Truly, we are spiraling, rather than merely cycling.

Okay, now here’s what I want to speak of today. My Coming Back Home series that I composed and published in the local newspaper when I again lived in my home town of Twin Falls, Idaho, back in 1976. The series was read by all sorts of people, and very much either appreciated or denigrated. Finally, after the 7th one the publisher took me to lunch to say that there were simply too many important people in town who did NOT appreciate the series, and that he would have to stop it, now.

Here’s the ebook I composed of this series.

Coming Back Home

 

Two years later, I found myself leaving another publication, one that I had started myself, and then, of course, as is my way, grew restless.

Here’s the piece I wrote in OpenSpace, about my life’s journey back then.

 

EYES ARE LIGHT SENSITIVE

 

I wrote that essay as the final column for the newspaper, and then, when it was not published, shelved it for two years.

It begins:

Plato tells the story of a people who lived in a cave. All day long these people sit, backs to the door, staring at reflections on the wall. These reflections — dancing shadow and light — the people take to be real, the real world, the facts.

Ever so often one of these people stares at the wall for too long. He grows hypnotized: the wall disappears, his orientation dissolves; he is left lost, lost and confused. 

Usually, the strange one returns to his normal state of staring in time. Nobody notices. Nobody gets embarrassed . . .

I was talking about myself. . .

Another excerpt:

We come into this world, says Plato, trailing clouds of glory, knowing all and everything. Yet we leave it knowing only “the facts,” mere shadows. Why. How does this happen.

Thus the story of the cave.

Here’s the drawing that accompanied this article:

Wow. I just this morning realize that this drawing includes me! (taken from a photo that I remember well). I have no memory of who did the drawing . . .

A bit more from that old essay, which even now, I find utterly remarkable. So amazing, to have lived one’s life consciously, learning, learning, learning, both from experience, and how to express linguistically. So very grateful.

And if the path from the shadows to the door is full of pitfalls, then the path ahead is infinitely steeper, longer: the distance form earth to the sun.

Our seeker has turned, his body now faces the door. Slowly, surely, and of its own accord, that body moves through the door and into the light. A living body seeks to warm itself. This is only natural. But eyes were not made to turn to the sun. Eyes are light-sensitive; too much sun can blind. These blind ones are our burnt-out cases.

In order to turn to the sun, and not go blind, our seeker must look obliquely, as if only in passing. There is no direct path to the truth. This seeker is mortal. Mortals have bodies. Human bodies have eyes. Eyes are light-sensitive.

Our seeker has seen the light.

And the light has made him changed. And he is full of light now, compassionate.

He returns to his homeland, the cave. But his fellows do not recognize him. They stare as he walks by. 

And he looks at them, and sees their stares, and feels strange. He is a stranger, and this is a strange land, his homeland, a land he no longer feels at home in.