There are souls in this world which have the gift of finding joy everywhere and leaving it behind them when they go. Frederick William Faber
Emiel, a very talented blog author recently wrote an article about parallel universes, “walk the garden of forking paths“. We all live in our own reality, but at any moment we can make the active choice to look into another life, to dive straight into it and make their experience, their reality our own for a while.
But now, I wonder what will happen if we go a step further? If we don’t only explore parallel worlds, but remain in places we feel comfortable in and leave a part of our souls behind.
Several times during our travels, we felt such a deep connection with a place, a city, a country and its people that we only reluctantly, often after months or even years, departed. And in some cases even gone back again after a while.
But wait! What does that mean? Only now, looking back, we realize what happened to us during the years of our journeys. We have lost (or planted?) seeds from which trees have grown and they are now calling us, demanding our attention and effectively, our return. Our souls have split. We call locations on various latitudes and longitudes our home.
Where will the homesickness take us? And will we still be able to find peace, if there is always another part of our soul pulling on us?
Or should we spin the story further and wonder whether a soul can even become more profoundly complete and happy through planting many trees all over the world? Maybe their branches and roots will even grow so long that they will eventually meet and create a kind of giant web around the Earth?
Is it a fortune or a curse to call several places your home?
PS. Despite all, the connection to my home country grows ever stronger, the older I get. When we meet fellow citizens, some inexplicable thread stretches between us, which can only, to my knowledge and experience, exist between people who have grown up like us, who have listened to the same lullabies, who have laughed to the same jokes, watched the same TV programs, read the same books, learnt in the same school system and share similar traditions and morals.
No matter how long we live in the outland and how many magnificent trees we grow in the far away places, it seems that there is only one set of very deeply anchored roots.