Where is this place called home?  The elders often sit with a distant look and one hears them say I need to go home.  Most lives have given no exact place to these words, but all of us have heard them said since we were children.

I brought this place with me when I arrived on this planet, this lush planet I have come to love and call home. I have buried my face in her earth smell.  Yet I have spent almost a hundred years less a decade, on the outside looking in.

Strange, isn’t it? I love this planet and have taken care of her in the best ways I could.  Where is that place  I brought with me, with a foot dragging behind with more than  memory, but with knowledge I was  loved enough to stay the route until I took the lessons to heart and was healed?

It is the place where words such as honor, trust, love and bonding melded my soul to the weight of words, the only way I had to intricately meld who I am with one who matched and recognized these soul stuffs in me.  The weight of these words, in whatever measure I knew to be the highest and best of who I am, would be the bar I would forever live lives of mine to reach.  The thought that I would not meet this bar, or that  I would settle for less, never occurred.

When it did, I was told that my grief stemmed from integrating the weight of my words  and trying  to balance in a world not ready for them.   My unbelieving puzzlement at what I heard?

Did you say, or did I hear right???  Whatever I heard was right but wrong in what I thought they meant.  But I believed you I said and heard the words, well THAT was your problem! It was a shared reality but not shared perceptions.

In these stressful times where evidence is pictured all day on our screens at home, there is a reality we participate in.  The pictures hold different meanings for us according to our perceptual prejudices.  If the camera does not support our prejudices we say it is a fake picture.  I learned that a man convinced against his will is unconvinced still.  Until there is a something he relates to.  Like a body going into a freezer truck because the hospital morgue is full.  And he grew up down the street from this hospital.

Stressful times reveal our fabric.  Look to how you manage your days to see whether you are the role model you hoped to be or have become the person you hoped to meet.  Work on it.