Small Town Sunset by visualrhetor

Throughout my life I’ve had a series of dreams about other towns. Sometimes I travel through a forest and discover a football field. The crisp smells of fall leaves are in the air as are the sounds of the small town preparing for the “big game.” Sometimes I fly to another town and see buildings and neighborhoods and parks that stir me with longing. Other times I encounter a person or group of people that are unfamiliar, and yet when I meet them I feel bound to them. In fact, I awake longing for those lost friendships.

This series of dreams has one thing in common. Each time I awake with an ache for people and places that seem part of my life and yet are unfamiliar. This ache, this longing, this memory seems so real and sometimes it haunts my mind and heart for days. Today as I read the following poem by Rod Jellema, I heard in his words the echo of this longing. Jellema captures the essence of the longing for a land that is just out of reach, the place CS Lewis reminded us was “higher up and farther in.”

Travel Advisory

Remind yourself, when you wake to a strangeness
of foreign lights through blowing trees
out the window of yet another hotel,
that home is only where you pretend your from.
What’s familiar sends you packing,
watching for “some lost place called home.”
You’re from wherever you go.

Don’t admit what you’re looking for.
If you say to a baker in Bremen, to a barmaid
in Provence, “Back home we think of you here
as having deeper lives,” they’ll shrug you wrong
and won’t respond. And then you’ll know:
they’re strangers too. Broken and wrinkled
stones and skin, brush strokes and chords,
old streets and saints you’ve read about,
flute-notes in the laughter of foreign children,
the nip of the local market cheese–
there’s a life we almost knew once.
Watch. Just let it in.

The return ticket will take you only
to the town where you packed to get on the plane.
It never missed you. You’ll notice
alien goods in your kitchen, wind in a wall,
losses in the middle drawer of your desk.
Even there, the strange is the cup of communion
you drink; that dim outlandish civitas dei
you’re a citizen of never was a place.
Remember not to feel too much at home.

by Rod Jellema, A Slender Grace, 79

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