Homesick for a foreign land...

   “Every dreamer knows that it is entirely possible to be homesick for a place you've never been to, perhaps more homesick than for familiar ground.”

   This quote by Judith Thurman caught my eye because it so entirely fits the theme of this blog. I don't know who Judith Thurman is, I've never even heard of her...but I love her thinking!

   All my fellow dreamers out there, you know what homesickness we are talking about. That feeling that you get right after you finish a really fantastic book that you never wanted to end because it was just so awesome...that's what I'm talking about. That intense longing to go back to wherever it was that you were within those pages. When you look up after you've just read and read and re-read yet again the last few lines of that novel because you can't believe that it's really the end, and you realize that you've just taken that whole journey all by yourself despite the wonderfully magical friendships you've made with the characters along the way. And as much as you want to talk about it with someone just as you would after you've gotten home after physically going somewhere...you can't. Because no one else has been where you've been and they don't understand. I often try to tell my family all about my journeys through book after book, but they don't understand because they haven't gone on it and, until they do, I'm on my own. I've longed for the prairies of Minnesota (just to be with the Ingalls family...), for the bush of Africa, for the busy-ness and anonymity of New York, for the carefree-ness of California...I've longed for many places. Only, my homesickness transcends just place to interfere with time as well. I've dreamed of the Wild West, of Victorian England, of the 1930's in Virginia (just be with the Walton family...). 

    And sometimes, when my imagination is really running free, I find myself homesick for places that don't even exist; places that you could never find on a map because they simply are not there. They are in my imagination and I love these places and I sincerely wish that they were real because I would just spend my life there, in the land that I've created in my mind. I tried to create one of my places that is in my imagination once. I went out into my woods where there is a little creek bubbling through the long grasses and tall trees and wild flowers. When the sun hits the greenery just right, I swear it's like magic. It's the most magical place I've ever seen...and it's just yards away from my house. So, I decided to build a little house out of tree branches and braided grass and decorate with flowers and old glass jars. Unfortunately, it didn't survive the next summer storm...but it was so wonderful while it lasted. And, surprisingly, it actually did resemble the land in my dreams. 

   This feeling...this longing...this homesickness (which is just the greatest way to describe it, though I'd never thought of it until this quote came along)... It's happened so often and intensely to me that I'm getting used to it. I'm kind of glad because it's like I am constantly being ripped apart at the hands of a paperback. But at the same time...I hope that I never get entirely used to it because that means that part of my imagination would become average, and average is definitely not my goal. Maybe it was once. But not anymore.

   And so this is the way that I feel about Uganda. Though I've never been there, though I've never set foot on that land, I long to be there. It's strange and it's confusing, even to me, but I know that it's somehow so right.