Departure and Return of the Prodigal

Home is where one starts from. As we grow older
The world becomes stranger, the pattern more complicated…
We must be still and still moving
Into another intensity
For a further union, a deeper communion.
T.S.Eliot

I finished my first year of college in a cloud of smoke. It was 1970, the year student strikes closed universities in protest of the expansion of the Vietnam war into Cambodia. I was attending Boston University that spring.

One day, not long after four students were killed by National Guardsmen at Kent State, Abbie Hoffman spoke to thousands of students on the Boston Common. His rhetoric of revolution inflamed us all. That night I took the subway across the river to Cambridge to see if anything was going on and when the train pulled into the station there were fires burning along side the tracks. Panicked people sought an exit, but upon climbing the steps to the street, they discovered the streets of Harvard Square were also on fire.

I was thrilled. I found a friend and we joined in the melee. We ran through the streets, up and down dimly lit alleys, reveling in the riotous atmosphere. It was clear that the established order was breaking down. History was in the making and we were there!

Then police on horseback in full riot gear began hurling tear gas into the crowd. Bricks were thrown from both sides -- a policeman was hit in the shoulder, a rioter spurted blood from a head wound. My friend and I ducked into a church that had been set up as an infirmary. Inside, twenty or more young people lay on makeshift pallets with cuts and bruises; an ambulance siren in the distance signaled the attempt to secure help for one man who was more seriously hurt.

It was late by now and everyone was exhausted. Someone lit up a joint and passed it around. As was the fashion in those days, we all took communion and mellowed out. After a while, we all drifted back to our dormitories to sleep.

The headlines in the newspaper the next day didn't capture the significance of the night's activities, but nonetheless, university administrators cancelled final exams and granted us all passing grades before closing their doors. They felt it wise to send their students back home where they might be less trouble.

I returned home to Marietta. Even without comparing it to the excitement in Cambridge that night, Marietta in those days was a very dull small town. I took up my summer job as the copy girl at the Marietta Daily Journal, getting to work at 6:30a.m. to be able to organize the morning's press releases for the writers in the newsroom. While I'd done this job every day for three months the summer before, this year it was torture for me to last the four days I did before leaving suddenly for a prodigal adventure.

Convinced that there was a real life to be lived in the world someplace other than Dullsville, USA I took off with a guy I'd vaguely known for a couple of years on a hitchhiking trip to Canada and points west. We'd been romantically involved for about a week before we decided to go. Lying, I told my mother we would be travelling with friends in a VW bus. Everyone was doing it, I argued, so she shouldn't worry. She was angry with me and I thought she was unreasonable, like most of the Establishment. I didn't want to hurt her, but my independence was at stake. I had to go, and on my own terms.

Bob had $180 for the trip, and I had $80. We bought peanut butter, honey and day-old bread and filled our army surplus back packs. Bob's brother took us out to Hwy. 41 (I-75 didn't go farther north than Marietta at the time) and we caught our first ride.

We'd spent a night on top of Kennesaw Mountain sleeping in a bed of poison ivy a few days before we left town. Bob wasn't allergic to it, but I was. As we now hitchhiked the highways and byways of the American continent in the middle of June, I became covered from head to toe with itching, oozing blisters. My eyes were swollen shut and I couldn't wear shoes even though the asphalt I walked on was melting under the summer sun.

Needless to say, I was more irritable than a laid-back hippie chick was supposed to be and my romance with Bob did not blossom. Things went from tentatively okay to really awful in short order. While we passed through the beautiful lake country of northern Minnesota and southern Ontario, and were met with the incredible generosity of the native people of a destitute reservation, and watched myriad dazzling sunsets in the Rocky Mountains, I was not happy with the diet we could afford (endless peanut butter and honey sandwiches), the company we kept ( the rides we got occasionally produced the kind of relationships worth mentioning, but more often I was fighting off the advances of sleazy drivers while Bob slept in the back seat), or the weather (caught off-guard in a snowstorm by the shores of a lake in Montana's Glacier Park with only a thin blanket for cover).

It was "California or Bust" for us and we eventually made it. At the time, the Haight-Ashbury district of San Francisco was the counterculture haven for all of us who were wandering about America that summer. It was great seeing grubby people just like us all over the place. We shared stories of life on the road, and suddenly what we were doing seemed to have a larger purpose. We were not just two miserable people who didn't have anything to say to each other, we were part of a Movement! Surrounded by our peers, we felt righteous, even good about having left home. If life was hard it was because we were taking the road less traveled, and beyond that, marking new trails for others to follow.

But then things turned ugly. I got really angry one day when someone ripped off my 35mm camera in a cafe in Berkeley, so we got out of the city, seeking sanctuary from the city by the cool streams of the Sierra Nevada's. We spent three days along with about fifty other urban refugees diving off the huge boulders of the South Fork of the Yuba River into her pristine pools, drinking deeply of her bountiful refreshment. The fact that this delicious water was swarming with microscopic giardia did not come to light until a few days later, when having backpacked into Yosemite's Tuolumne Meadow wilderness, we realized a huge deficit of toilet tissue. Doubled up with cramps, dehydrated, and too weak to walk the four miles to civilization, we lay for several days praying to survive long enough to get home.

Visions of dull Marietta danced in my imagination as if it were Shangri-La. My parent's house, the home I grew up in that had felt like a prison throughout high school, now seemed like a posh hotel. Wouldn't it be great to have running water, a toilet, a real stove with an oven? If I could only be home, I wouldn't complain about my father's oppressive pipe smoke, my mother's suspicious questions, my little brother's pesky friends. Like Dorothy in Oz, I longed for the home like which there was no other place.

Somehow Bob and I recovered sufficiently to make it back to Berkeley where we collapsed at a friend's apartment and slept for a week. When we woke up we were strong enough to start home. We'd been on the road for a month or more. We were sick, tired, broke. We wanted to get home (and away from each other) as fast as possible. Gratefully, rides appeared to take us back to Montana, where we hopped a freight train. We rode eight hours in a cold, loud boxcar to go a hundred miles to a small town where we could catch the fast train to Minneapolis, but when we got to there we discovered there had a been a wreck east of town it would take several days to clear.

When we stuck our thumbs out once again, two men who resembled Charlie Manson slowed down their car, and gave us the finger while driving circles around us up onto the sidewalk. When they stopped and told us to get in, I made sure Bob could put his hand on the hunting knife if necessary. They turned out to be nasty but relatively harmless guys who'd gotten drunk the night before, driven 600 miles to Idaho, and were now on their way home to meet their angry wives with as much remorse as they could muster with such bad hangovers. We made good time with them -- in an hour we'd gone 120 miles -- in spite of the fact they'd slow down to rip red warning flags off the sides of slow-moving tractors we'd pass along the side of the road.

We re-traced our route back down through Chicago, waiting out downpours tucked up under the interstate's bridges where trucks roaring by overhead sounded like they were going to run right through us, and finally we hobbled down old 41, the "See Rock City" signs painted on barn rooftops a welcome sight, Acworth Beach as exciting to behold as the mighty Pacific, the Big Chicken with the promise of its greasy fowl more enticing than any five star fare. As I walked up Campbell Hill Street to my parent's house, I fully realized how much I loved this place, how much I wanted to be there, how much I needed and wanted a home.

My mother and I differ today in our memory (my myth or hers?)of what happened next, but I am quite sure that this prodigal daughter was not greeted with rings and new shoes from her grateful father. As I recall, my mother was relieved to see me in one piece and not pregnant, but my father was furious with me. After I spent one night at home, he requested that my mother tell me that I was no longer welcome in their home. She was not sure she agreed with him, but felt it important to honor his wishes. Stunned by this turn of events, certainly not the stuff of my homecoming fantasy, I packed my things and left.

What to do? I'd spent my $80 in riotous living (not!) in the far country. I'd left my job without giving notice (although I had sent a friend in to replace me). I was 18 years old, a college dropout (I knew I could never go back to that huge university), and I had nothing to speak of except the ability to make to make a rather dense loaf of bread out of whole wheat flour, yeast, honey and water, and a well-honed (from the hitchhiking trip) capacity for making do under adverse conditions.

Where to go? I had a couple of friends in school there, so I moved to Athens, GA. My first official home on my own was a friend's walk-in closet in the boarding house room he shared with someone else. I painted the walls white and found a small mattress to sleep on. There was a window in the closet that opened into the bathroom; I could hear everyone showering, and sometimes they would peer through the window and wave. The paint fumes in the closet drove me out within a week, and I resumed a life of transience that lasted more or less for the next four years.

But even though I found other places to call home, none satisfied the longing I had for the home of my childhood. Try as I might to establish relations with my family of origin -- through trying to do things to please them, through therapy, through renewed contact in various settings; or with a family of my choosing -- people I worked with as a nurse, friends and lovers along the way, "intentional" communities, artistic, political or spiritual groups-- none filled the void that I believed the experience of a real home would. None provided the sense that I, the one who had wandered long in the far country, was truly welcome in the world.

Looking back at these attempts to find a place to come home to, I realize how futile was my search. Until I was ready to come home to my own inner true Self, there could be no outer home to call my own. As long as I looked outside myself for the right situation to call home, I was destined to accumulate experiences, that while they might have been colorful-- good material for a Tom Robbins novel, were part of a far country life, and ultimately unsatisfying.

Jesus said, "The foxes have their dens and the birds of the air have nests, but the Son of man has no place to rest his head." On the material plane, that is. No matter how diligent we are in the application of family values to our life, if this is done as part of a strategy to avoid our true self, this will fail to produce a home in the world that will resist the inevitable challenges of a growing, maturing soul. An "establishment" made by a mind that seeks to control life rather than learn from it, will be destroyed by the life force as it awakens our heart's intelligence and longing. Our real home, the place where we can actually rest, is eternal and infinite awareness. Our real home is consciousness!

"Is that Consciousness, Iowa or Consciousness, Wisconsin?" the mind inquires, "and when will we get there?".

The journey home is complete when we relinquish to our heart the strivings in our head. A Zen teacher I know says "What is bright to the mind is dark to the heart." The head, conscious mostly of a self separate from all that is, generates ideas that reinforce the isolation that maintains a sense of opposition within its experience-- loser/winner, insider/outsider, faithful/infidel. The heart, which is simply a metaphor for the consciousness of the interconnectedness of all things, does not understand the dualistic mindset that dominates the intellect. For us to find our way home to our heart's perception of wholeness, where we truly belong (without efforting to do so), all our great ideas for self-, other-, or home improvement, must be submitted to the large heart of compassion for review.

The head will not always understand this need to surrender fearful defenses in order to find a loving home within, for what is bright to the heart is almost always dark to the mind. To the mind, heart-sense is nonsense. It is absolutely non-rational for the mind to give up its strategies for being in control and for gaining approval and a sense of belonging in order to trust the flow of a supposedly abundant but invisible life force.

However, when the mind exhausts itself wandering in the isolation of the far country, the heart welcomes the mind home. In Jesus' parable, there is a great feast in celebration of the prodigal's return. What was lost has been found and this is worthy of a big feed, some new clothes, a nice ring.

But what happens after that? We party down and then what? Do we give our minds to our hearts only to become blubbering idiots or religious sentimentalists? Do we hang out around the homestead contemplating our navels from now on?

Not exactly. You'll remember from the parable, one of the first gifts the prodigal son receives on his return is a new pair of shoes (hmmm... didn't Dorothy have some too?). Shoes stand under us, are symbolic of understanding. The son's old understanding was left somewhere back in the far country and is replaced, at home, with a new one.

Our mind isn't left behind when it surrenders to the heart; it is transformed with a new understanding of how to function. The transformed mind understands it no longer serves well to separate us from reality. The transformed mind is like the Ouroborus; the snake that eats its own tail is the mind, conscious of its own proclivity for excluding at least half of reality -- it gobbles up, digests and eventually eliminates its own misconceptions, ad infinitum. This transformed mind can thus bring us into greater harmony with our heartful wholeness.

Low interest rates have enticed people across the nation to become homeowners. Several people I know are buying houses for the first time and I share their excitement as they engage the activity of making a home. My own experience of this has been most rewarding, and I have a colorful, cozy bungalow to show for it. I've noticed, however, in the six years since I bought the house I live in, that my notion of what a home is for has shifted.

I've discovered that a real home is not a womb where I am sheltered from the world, it is more like a cocoon where I can undergo necessary changes in my consciousness. I once tried to make my home a place I could be safe from the intrusion of unwanted influences, but I now see my home as a safe place to engage those influences more fully. I've traded the dream of a home in which I'd live happily ever after, for the exploration of the reality of what in me gets in the way of happiness now, moment by moment. I wanted my home to look like something from House Beautiful, and now I realize that no matter how the surface of things at home appears -- sleek or worn -- my true home is an awareness of beauty and love that shines from deep within. It is that recognition of this beauty in all things that allows my experience to be that I am truly at home wherever and whenever I am aware that I am not who I think, but who I don't think, that I am.

In your heart is the home to whose warmth you can return to again and again, forever. Wherever your prodigal adventures have led you, no matter how far afield your mind has taken you, this day you are welcome home in your own heart and deep true Self.

Copyrighted, NCM Press, 2002