Feeling at home

Today, I went two hundred kilometers and back.
To and from a place which is 10.365 kilometers or 6441 miles away from home.

This evening, I realised what it was I felt.
I felt at home.

At home?

??

I've always thought of home as a place. Somewhere you can mark with an 'X' on the map. Somewhere special. Real. With a dimension of geographical presence.

I've also heard the version that 'Home is where I lay my head'. Or my hat, for that matter.

Home is both more and less than those things. Less than a specific place in space. More than a feeling.

Home is a state of mind.
And that particular state of mind can be reached in probably a handful of ways.

My very near ones, my loved ones, can induce it in a wink of an eye. Yes, here I belong, with you, us. That is home.

Books can do it. I'm so much always home in a book that it is such a disappointment when I dive into one and find out that, no, in this one, I'm not. But generally, I enter the book's universe and I'm at home. Magic of books, that is.

Nature does it to me. A steep slope of a mountain, the lush greenness of a spring forest, the moon or a clear star shining to me from a dark night's sky, a sudden buffeting of strong winds on a steep sidewalk in Brazil. I'm at home in nature.

Friends, friends really can do it, too. And music can do it. Like both did today. On a long road where I had no business feeling at home.

Yet I did. Very much so.

And oh, how I feel lucky for it.

- - - - - - - - -

Here is the start of this - rapidly jotted down at the corner terrace table at the Catedral do Chopp in Campinas, Brazil:

...at some point, the waiter's pen stopped working. And given that he didn't speak English and I surely don't speak Portuguese and that I had literally stolen it out of his breast pocket, I chose not to try to get another pen...