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Homecomings 2005 Homecoming One - The Island

I was born thousands of miles away from home. I didn't know how far; all I knew was that I always wanted to get away from the place where I was born. And as soon as I was old enough I did just that. The next twenty years I spent traveling and searching. Searching for home and searching for my soul - always moving on, never looking back. I found many places I liked, but none ever felt like home. Twenty years and eighty countries later, everything changed. It was the day I came to California. I came from Nevada, crossing Death Valley, heading for the coast. And there, at the foothills of the Sierra Nevada, I realized that every mountain, every tree and every river was talking to me. The feeling got stronger the closer I came to the ocean and when I finally made it to Big Sur, the mountains, the redwoods and the ocean said, "Welcome home!"

It was not the first time California greeted a newcomer. I'm sure that thousands of years ago, when the first people arrived here, they heard the same words. I got interested in their history and in their spirituality. The Native American concept of Mother Earth and Father Sky was the first belief system that ever made sense to me and it allowed me to open up for other concepts too. If someone would ask me today to paint a picture of God, it would be a jigsaw puzzle with pieces coming from all four corners of the world. Over the years, the picture got larger, but until a short time ago it had a big hole in the middle: The Native American cultures I studied talked a lot about the earth and all her children, but they didn't say much about the ocean - to me the holiest part of all of creation. One weekend in spring, I went to a spiritual gathering in Ventura and the Monday after I took a ship to the Channel Islands. It was on my way to Santa Cruz Island when I first heard about the Chumash people who once upon a time inhabited the islands. One day, Mother Earth created a rainbow bridge to the mainland and asked the Chumash to walk over the bridge. They did as they were told, but some of them fell down from the rainbow and into the ocean. To keep them from drowning, Mother Earth turned them into dolphins. Until this day, the dolphins are the brothers and sisters of the Chumash. There it was - the missing piece of the puzzle. Brother Ocean. I spent the rest of the afternoon on the mountaintop that was believed to be the starting point of the rainbow bridge. After all these years, I finally found what I was searching for.

They say home is where you first found God. For a moment in spring, I was home.

Homecoming Two - The Ship

For all my traveling years, ships were my home away from home and it took something like California to trade the Navy for a real home. I never regretted stepping ashore and settling down, but I sure missed being on board a ship. The "Islander" that took me to Santa Cruz Island was my first ship in almost a decade. Of course, being a passenger was not the same and the crew must have noticed my longing looks because pretty soon they invited me into the wheel house. I got a 30 minute crash course in the latest state of navigation and had a chance to find out how much I still remembered about Compass, Radar, GPS, and sea charts.

And then, on the way back home, with Ventura Harbor twenty minutes away, the captain handed me the wheel and said, "Take her home into the port." For a moment in spring, I was home.

Homecoming Three - The Harbor

All my life, I was on the move. There was always something new to discover, something new to experience, something new to screw up. It took an Act of God to make me stop, and these acts don't happen very often. After returning from Santa Cruz Island, I had a five-hour drive back home ahead of me and really had to keep going. But somehow, I couldn't leave the harbor just yet. I slowed down, and then, I actually stopped, doing nothing but reflecting on a day that brought me closer to home than any other day in recent history did. And when the sun was about to set I went down to the beach and I knew, no matter where I would go from here - that's where I would be. And no matter what time it was - it would always be now. For a moment in spring, I was home.

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