The Homecoming
The spiritual search is not an ascent but a return
“Your recent essays have left me with a question I can’t seem to shake.
You often point back to the ordinary — going to work, raising children, paying bills — as though these aren’t distractions from truth but expressions of it.
But if that’s the case, why does ordinary life so often feel... flat?
Why does my mind keep searching for something more profound, more spiritual, more meaningful, if reality is supposedly already complete as it is?
Is the search itself part of the problem, or is there something genuine that it is trying to discover?”
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The search isn’t a problem. You seek because you are haunted by an unshakeable memory of what it was like.
A memory that lives not as an idea or an image - but more as a feeling that resides deep within your bones. That feeling of what ‘home’ felt like. When home was not just the four walls around you but being itself. When the divine was as much a reality as the mundane. When the sacred shone from within every seashell, from underneath rocks, in your mother’s laughter, even in the hurt you felt when your best friend moved away.
Your search is really a homecoming. And, I know - so many have pointed to the fact that home is where we already are and that there is nowhere to really go, because we’ve never really left. I’ve said it plenty too. But simply acknowledging that intellectually falls flat, doesn’t it? Because it’s not some physical place you are in search of. It’s that feeling of home. Of such existential safety and warmth, that you feel free to simply be as you are. Where you no longer need to be on your ‘best behaviour’. Where you don’t need to ensure whether others will like you or accept you because you are already unconditionally accepted.
That is what you are seeking, isn’t it? The freedom to be without needing to justify your own existence. To see unconditional love and acceptance reflected back to you. To know that even if monsters come looking for you - you will be held, you will be protected, you will be safe.
But how many adults truly feel that way? How many feel totally at home in this big, bad world?
No, this world doesn’t feel like home - it feels more like an orphanage. And we, its 8 billion occupants - children of this planet - were orphaned the moment that native connection was severed and we were cast into a world of abstraction.
There was a reason you paused to pick up stones when you were a child. Back then you could still feel into the spirit of things. Each stone had a unique spirit - and you knew this even if you couldn’t express it in words. That is why it was worth putting it in your pocket. You knew there was no other stone like it in the whole world. And when you jumped in a puddle - you were very careful to pay attention to what the puddle said to you. Each puddle said something different - often something uniquely hilarious - which is why you laughed so loudly each time. Jumping in puddles was like going to a standup comedy show.
Trees were worthy of love. Frogs were worthy of friendship. Clouds were worthy of admiration. A simple piece of paper was worthy of your greatest masterpiece.
That was the world you once lived in. It was a sacred world. Sacred - because you could feel the spirit of all that you encountered. There was never a rush to get anywhere, because rushing would mean losing out.
Yet, the grownups around you seemed differently oriented. They seemed to live in a different kind of world. When you showed them the rocks you had collected, you were introducing them to your new friends, but they smiled distractedly and said condescending things like,
“Very nice, honey!”
That’s when you realized, that they lived in a different world than you did. They lived in the world of things - but not the spirit of things.
And even in your little child mind - you mused on what it would be like if the rocks in your pocket were no longer alive. If they no longer had personalities. If they no longer spoke to you. What must it be like to live in a dead world?
What you didn’t quite realize, at the time, was that you were being prepared to inhabit just such a world. As you grew older - the adults, the schools, the sports organizations, the systems that supported you - incentivized one thing and one thing only. The knowledge of the world of things.
Your perception into the spirit of things was altogether ignored. You were even punished for it. When the mathematics teacher was drilling you with your timetables - you noticed the little ant who had ventured onto your desk and was tentatively seeking a place of shelter, and you gently allowed him to climb onto your hand. But that moment of friendship was labelled ‘a distraction’ by your teacher and you were sent to the principal’s office for it.
You were constantly told you needed to ‘smarten up’ and to ‘learn the way the real world works’ and this confused you. Because you had always known how the world worked and had never once doubted it. Except the world you knew so well was that of the spirit of things. This ‘real world’ the grownups kept talking about was the dead one - the world of things. And from your vantage point there was very little that was real about it. It seemed mostly like grownup make-believe.
Yet, as the years wore on, and the more you were incentivized by those around you - your parents, your teachers, your peers, your professors, your bosses, your mentors, your leaders - the more you came to inhabit the world of things, and the more you lost your connection to the spirit of things.
Rocks became inanimate objects. Frogs became noisy amphibians. Shells became things you could cut your feet on if you weren’t careful.
Intimacy. Connection. Relationship. These became unnecessary. Even redundant.
In the world of things only one thing mattered. Accumulation. The capacity to trade. The more you had, the more opportunities you created to have more.
Value was not something inherent but something manufactured and accrued.
Even human relationships became a mechanism to leverage power and access.
Whereas once your pockets could only hold a few stones - now you could fill your cupboards with them. And not just any stones. Precious ones that you couldn’t just find in a forest but that miners in faraway lands would have to dig deep into the earth to retrieve. You even displayed a few of these stones on your finger - or on the face of your new watch.
But no matter how many you accumulated. Not a single one spoke to you.
That world of dead things that the grownups in your life once seemed to inhabit is where you found yourself now.
How can one feel alive when surrounded with dead things? When the people we meet are more stone-like than the stones that we once carried in our pockets? When every creature, every event, every person, every experience is turned into an object, then a commodity?
When your house feels less like a home and more like a mausoleum? When social introductions sound more like eulogies? When even your desire to connect with something deeper is outsourced to religious institutions and middlemen that translate the spirit of things into the language of objects - another goal to be achieved, another transaction to be brokered.
You wonder why ordinary life feels so flat. It is not life but your perspective that has been flattened.
