what is home?

what is it to be a person not at home? i am once again back in darjeeling, at the beginning of another tour that will have me not at home for eight months. i guess this begs the question, 'what is home?'. for now it is a small piece of earth in northern new mexico. And than, it is so much more. you will have to give me some room here as last night i had a dream where sadness roamed. for me, emotions experienced in dreams are broader and deeper than what i experience in a waking state. i think that awake there is a distance we need to bridge to connect to this core. a distance that consciousness creates to allow our being in this world of doing. while we sleep we are in this place that i am calling core. it is a place of communion with our self. a place where emotions are not shrouded by reality or doing. a place of being. as such, emotions i experience in this place, upon awakening, drape across my doing as a scent. lingering, drifting in and out, and slowly thinning into a memory of indeterminate meaning. awaking here, away from my garden, separate from family, immersed in a culture and language not my native, this sadness questions who i am, what it is that i do, where it is that i am going. it reminds me that life is separation. it is this separation that allows us to experience what we call reality. it is how we are able to conceive ourselves as unique from others. it is a separateness that is necessary for life to occur. I believe also that it is this separateness that drives us to create, to desire, to search, to conquer, to forgive, to hate, to love. it is, perhaps, the opposite of what we call home. And though we will find refuge in people, places, and things that we call home, these are truly only temporary experiences. it is in our dreaming that we approach what is nearer to our true home. thus, when we return to consciousness with emotions of this core we realize what it is that we lack here, now. in traveling there is a heightened since of engagement with reality. a weight is lent to experience and in this way our separateness is draped in a sense of adventure. it is like moving further from something so we seem closer to it. however, it is also such that when a thing occurs to remind us of this distance the experience is even more acute, more real, and more encompassing. so i sit here drinking filter coffee at sonam's in darjeeling typing away my sadness so that, for the moment, i can continue this doing in an attempt to once again return home.