In a recent post we discussed traveling to other places to Embrace Nirvana. Here we will discuss Embracing Nirvana at home. Home is where your heart is, it is a place of belonging. This sense of belonging takes on a different meaning for all of us. We all have our own ideology of what that sense of belonging is.
I grew up in a frozen tundra known as Wisconsin. Wisconsin has about 4 months of t-shirt weather, 4 months of unbearably frigid cold temperatures, and four months of weather somewhere in the middle, but closer to the cold end of the spectrum in my opinion. Wisconsin never felt like home to me growing up, and I spent most of my childhood thinking about how I could get out of there, and move someplace warm.
This was only my opinion of course, as there are many people who live in Wisconsin, and love it there. Facebook makes reconnecting with people from the past very simple. Many of the people that I knew back in school still live in the same city they grew up in, and some even bought their parents’ house, and still live in the same house that they grew up in. I wonder how often they have ventured more than 50 miles from their own home. That would seem kind of boring to me, but they obviously enjoy being there enough to make it their home.
Most summers we would go visit family in the country. Most of them were farmers in the Black Hills area of South Dakota. The rolling hills out there make for some beautiful country to see. If you have never been to that part of America before it sure is a beautiful sight to behold. For those who live there it is the place they call home, and I can see why they call it home with ample majestic landscape all around them. I however never felt that I belonged there, which is to say it never felt like home to me.
When you’re from the city, and are spending some time on a farm, a ranch actually, it is quite an amazing experience. Looking around I saw land as far as I could see. There were sheep grazing in one area on the ranch off in the distance, and cattle were keep in another area. The smell was like nothing you would ever experience in the city. The smell of Alfalfa hay growing on the ranch to feed the sheep, cattle, and horses coupled with the slight smell of manure from the animals permeated the air.
Taking a walk among the sheep was stimulating. They were all constantly making their normal baaa sound, and there were at least a few hundred of them. They were clustered together in various groups. You could see patches of white off in the distance as they seemed to form cliques, yet they still behaved as a group. Reaching down to touch them reveled thick matted wool that wasn’t as soft as you would think.
The cattle were kept in a different area of the ranch than the sheep were. I remember it being a long walk to get there. It was almost driving distance between them. It was definitely horseback riding distance. We are talking about a very large spread of land.
The cattle like the sheep were grazing in the field, but they were more spread out than the sheep. It didn’t even phase them as we walked up to them. I scratched the head of one of them, and then reached down to grab a handful of the hay they were eating. The one I fed gently grabbed the hay from my hand, and looked right at me as it chewed its food. I was a young child at the time, and they were almost big enough to look me straight in the eye.
There was at least one bull that was grazing in the pasture. I walked up to him, and touched his horns, and he just looked at me like I was massaging his head. Calling him a bull may be the wrong term. He was born male, but had his testicles removed to make him more docile. I am sure that as a young child, I would not have been allowed in the pasture with a bull that had testosterone coursing through his veins.
It was an enjoyable treat for a city boy to experience that kind of life, but for my relatives out there it was their home. It was the only way of life that they had ever known.
The idea of home is different for everybody. Some prefer the city, while others enjoy the country. The allure of a big city like New York is intriguing to some, while others are more at home on a sandy beach with turquoise water in the Caribbean. We are all basically unique, and have our own ideology about what home means. There is no right, or wrong, only individual belief.
Embrace your individuality. Embrace your uniqueness.
Embrace Nirvana.
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