Having A Place

HOME SWEET HOME. You have to love a band that would call themselves Edward Sharpe and the Magnetic Zeros. No doubt you've heard their music, at least the song called, "Home" with a chorus that says, "Home is wherever I'm with you." That's a sentiment I can appreciate.

I know for a lot of people having a place seems important. Maybe there's something agrarian in their blood, or maybe that's just normal. After all, some of mankind's earliest stories are about a people seeking a Promised Land. And now, a bazillion years later they're still fighting over whose dirt is whose.

On the other end of the spectrum is the "this earth is not my home, I'm only passing through" crowd; also a sentiment I can appreciate. Back in 1972, a guy named Larry Norman made a record called, "Only Visiting This Planet". He was an important person for me back then.

As I mentioned in a post a few days back called, Coming of Age in 1969, I was swept up in the whole "give peace a chance" deal. Larry was one of the catalytic characters for a bunch of us who wanted to shake things up and saw in Jesus a model we could identify with: universal love, pacifism, radical worldview, etc. So the "Jesus Freak" became a part of the counter-culture movement.

One of the prevailing themes of the day (at least in my memory of it) was to be good stewards and caretakers of this big round ball that is our temporary home. Communal living and farming became grand experiments in the new paradigm.

Today, there is something very familiar in the air (and I'm not talking about the air in Colorado and Washington). Every time I go to Whole Foods® for groceries, there's a wash of nostalgia--young guys with full beards and flannel shirts, young moms with a baby swaddled to themselves. There is one big difference though: back in the day, the girls wore long dresses and beads. Today they wear yoga pants (regardless of their size) and a North Face® pullover.

The magazines on the rack by the cashier have to do with organic cooking and raising chickens rather than the public and private lives of pop culture's finest. I'm a sucker for subliminal advertising and I will admit right here that if our fair city of Oklahoma City had passed a recent consideration to allow us gated-community suburbanites to raise a couple of chickens, I would be building my coop as we speak. It didn't pass.

And it's not just places like Whole Foods®. The other day I was in Lowes® home improvement store. On the rack with books about building your own deck or converting your den into a garage was a book on raising goats. This was something I know something about. I had a goat when I was young. His name was Cocoa. I'm not sure what ever happened to him. I don't remember seeing him after my Uncle David, who had lived for years in Corpus Christie introduced us to a delicacy called the fajita.

While I do enjoy having a place to call my own, I believe that Woody Guthrie was right; in a sense. "This Land Is Your Land; This Land Is My land" sort of; at least for a while longer. However, I would be perfectly happy to hook to the Airstream® (once we own one), and with my Amazing Missus head off on some nomadic adventure, swapping stories and good food in the wayfaring commune of other adventurers.