Listen to Alan read “Coming Home Again for the First Time”
I couldn’t wait to get here. I’d been counting down the days until I would pack the car, drive 12 hours, and arrive here, and my anticipation had grown with every passing day. It happens like this every year. I can’t wait to “come home” to this place that has been the one constant in my life since I was 15 years old. The one place where I can touch every part of who I am. The one place where, year after year, I can sense and feel who I am and what I’m doing within the context of the whole of my life.
It’s a place called Chautauqua at the far western end of the state of New York—the home of Chautauqua Institution and the birthplace of the Chautauqua movement. For years, I’ve called it my “spiritual home.” Yet this summer, it’s showing me a deeper and more profound meaning of “home” than I ever imagined.
I first visited Chautauqua with my family in 1970, and I’ve returned here for a week or two nearly every summer for 54 years. This summer will be my first extended stay. I started planning a year ago, making all the necessary arrangements, including renting a one-room apartment in an old lakeside guesthouse that I have imagined staying in since childhood. Everything was arranged. I was going “home” for six weeks!
Yet as the time drew nearer, I was also feeling a bit anxious about the summer—the anxious feeling I get when I sense intuitively that something important is about to happen. A shift in awareness, a new discovery, a deeper understanding that could in some way transform who I am and how I engage with Life. Something about this summer at Chautauqua would be different. Something important.
And so, now I’m here. And it’s happening. Even within the first 24 hours, I could feel a deeper sense of stillness and rest in the core of my being. Now that I’ve been here for several days, it feels like I’ve “come home” to a place I’ve known all my life, yet in another way, for the first time. And not just to a place on the map. I feel like I’m in a process of “coming home” to a place deeper inside myself. I don’t know what it all means yet, but what I do know is that I’m sleeping more deeply and soundly than I have in months.
Chautauqua is an extraordinary place—and a really hard place to describe! For 150 years—since 1874—it’s been home to a multi-week summer festival weaving together lectures, concerts, exhibitions, dance, theater, cultural awareness, spirituality, and so much more on the shores of a beautiful lake. Chautauqua lives and breathes its commitment to life-long learning and civil discourse, and to nurturing and sustaining a democratic society where all people are respected as equals. One of its branding slogans is Chautauqua: A Place and an Idea. Indeed, Chautauqua is both. And in these last few days, I’m recognizing more fully that “home” can also be a place and an idea, a feeling and an experience, in ways I had never recognized before.
In the Celtic tradition, they speak of “thin places” on earth where the veil is lifted between the seen and unseen worlds. In her book Thin Places, Kerri ni Dochartaigh writes:
Heaven and earth, the Celtic saying goes, are only three feet apart, but in thin places that distance is even shorter. They are places that make us feel something larger than ourselves, as though we are held in a place between worlds, beyond experience. …
Places where a veil is lifted away and light streams in, where you see a boundary between worlds disappear right before your eyes, places where you are allowed to cross any borders, where borders and boundaries hold no sway. Lines and circles, silence and stillness—all is as it should be for that flickering gap in time.
—from Thin Places by Kerri ni Dochartaigh
Intuitively, the reality of “thin places” has made total sense to me for a long time. Yet reading her words now, the idea of “thin places” is breaking open for me in a new way. What if in those “thin places”, the veil is lifted not just between worlds, but also across time and space?
Chautauqua is where I came of age in a multitude of ways. When I am here, it’s as if every part of my life—every chapter, every experience, every way I have ever thought of myself, every awakening, every naïve and not-so-naïve love, every dream, every loss, every disappointment, every hurt, every incredible joy and celebration—is alive and present with me at the same time. Not in an overwhelming way, but rather in a healing way. In a way that intuitively I can sense how it all fits together and makes me who I am.
Chautauqua is the place where I have felt most “at home” for my whole life. And it’s showing me that “home” can be both a place and an idea where all I have ever been, all I have experienced, all I am now, and all I will ever be, is fully alive within my awareness at the same time. A place on the map and a place deep in the heart of my being where I can touch all of who I am.
With each passing day here, it does feel like I’m coming home again for the first time. I’ve been coming home to Chautauqua for years, yet never in this way. Understanding “home” as a “thin place” where all of time and space—every part of who we are, every person who has been a part of our lives, and every experience we’ve ever had—are alive within us. A place where we keep discovering more about who we are, what our lives have been about, and what new possibilities await.
This summer, Chautauqua is opening a new world of “home” to me. I’m not sure I’ve ever known such a blessing.
