“If ever I go looking for my heart’s desire again, I won’t look any further than my own backyard.
Because if it isn’t there, I never really lost it to begin with.”
Dorothy, L. Frank Baum, The Wizard of Oz
This Dorothy quote from The Wizard of Oz often comes to mind. I had it on my refrigerator for many years and sometimes when I searched for my own “yellow brick road” that didn’t work out, I’d remind myself that the answers were always much closer to home than “out there” somewhere.
It puzzled me for a long time when considering relocating: Do I take that job in Atlanta? Do I move to New Mexico? Do I move further away from my family? Am I not supposed to “bloom where I’m planted?”
Sometimes messages are not supposed to be taken literally. Perhaps the quote is simply a metaphor for looking inside ourselves for answers and sometimes those answers call for a physical relocation, sometimes not.
An ideal home to me is in the kind of social structure the Native Americans had with their self-sustaining villages, much like my ancestors as well who lived in Scottish clans. For the most part, families and chosen families, stayed together throughout their lives and each person had a role to fulfill in the community that made it work. New tribe members would join as they found common ground. Sometimes people would travel to other villages for entertainment and to share and learn and bring back knowledge and important new perspectives to their communities that made life better for all. They respected that other villages sometimes had different beliefs and ways of doing things than their own, and as long as nobody was hurting each other, “live and let live” was observed, and they learned good things from each other and often traded resources.
Good communities are that way now, whether in a small town or an urban district or neighborhood — each person relying upon the others during good times and bad, births and deaths, and all life’s in between phases. Home is the people you surround yourself with — those with whom you feel a connection — to do life with comfort, peace, support, and know it as a welcome place to play, create, and love.
My young neighbor recently graduated from college and has the world before him. He loves his rural upbringing and longs to stay near his friends, grandparents, and others that are home for him. Like my parents who moved to Dallas for work from rural East Texas decades ago, he’s finding he may have to do the same. He’s hoping for a remote position that allows him to stay. I hope so. We need him here.
Since moving to the land of my ancestors in East Texas more than 25 years ago, I’ve witnessed many others returning to their rural roots, or joining as new tribe members, after making their “fortunes” in larger cities across the country or choosing to raise their families in tighter knit circles. Those moves were necessary, and they are glad to be back or to have otherwise found their way here to build strong communities together.
Noting another famous quote from The Wizard of Oz, “There’s no place like home.” — P.A. Geddie
