I was out walking through town the other day, past some expensive new homes on the other side of a hill. They weren’t exactly mansions; a two-earner professional couple could possibly swing such a place with today’s low mortgage rates. I gather that families that buy such houses become quite attached to them. I myself have never owned real estate, but from what I’ve been told, ownership gives people a strong sense of connection to their homestead. And I guess that’s good in a lot of ways. But as for me, I like the idea of home being a movable concept, something not tied to any one structure or plot of land. That notion jibes well with the fact that we aren’t permanent residents of this planet. If we’re lucky, we get 70 or 80 years here, but they go by pretty quickly. I’m still holding out hope that we are citizens of a larger reality, something that transcends the space-time universe that we know of. I’m still thinking that our bittersweet years here are mainly a preparation course for something bigger and better.

I once read an article about some groovy Jesuit priest who had his own apartment somewhere and slept every night on a couch; he didn’t have a regular bed. That was his style. And actually, that sounds like my kind of style (although I have a regular bed but not a couch!). That priest seems to be the kind of guy who doesn’t put too much effort into making a nest for himself here in this realm, as he believes that his true home is somewhere else. You would have hoped that all priests and all spiritual seekers would have been like that. But in reality, there ain’t all that many like that. Oh well, too bad. Wrong planet I’m on, I guess. But it ain’t gonna be forever, for better and for worse.