Homecoming Part 5
September 12, 2026
My soul’s home as a child included not only the yard, but the expansive woods just over the barbed wire fence. With our cocker spaniel Sparkle by my side, I’d bend the strands of prickly wire and climb through without a scrape. On the other side was another world—one of adventure, wonder, discovery, awe, freedom, risk, and even danger. I knew someone else owned those woods—there were metal “no trespassing” signs posted on several trees, and I found rabbit traps in several places. But to me, this land was my territory, my domain—my soul’s home, even if no one else knew it.
There were scores of ancient oaks that grew Spanish moss like hair that hung like curly locks, and among the dense trees and brush were natural private rooms, the walls and roofs of which were made of thickets of smilax, honeysuckle, wild jasmine, and muscadine vines. Wild azaleas, magnolias, dogwoods, and beautyberry bushes grew profusely. In the springtime, my clothes carried a covering of yellow pollen and purple beautyberry stains. I learned to pull small sassafras saplings out of the earth, wipe the roots on my khaki shorts and chomp down on the soft roots with my teeth—the taste of root beer burst in my mouth.
The birds chirped continuously—squirrels and rabbits scurried around everywhere. I surprised a mother possum when I ran into her and her babies atop a live oak tree. Then she surprised me when she lunged at me. I worried about getting down the tall tree, but after seeing her bared teeth, I was on the ground in seconds.
No one knew, but I would open the screened doors of the rabbit traps set with bait on the forest floor and then watch as the newly released prisoners scampered off to freedom. As they ran, some would stop, turn around, and twitch their noses before running back home with their cotton tails bobbing behind them.
Winding trails took me through the trees down into deep, wide gullies that I imagined as Civil War encampments. I ran with Sparkle through the open fields, and she and I would get a drink at a hidden spring surrounded by bowing oaks, sturdy pines that whispered on the wind, and shiny-leaved magnolias. The still pool made by the gurgling spring reflected the entire world above me in every detail—tree limbs, pinecones, clouds, sun, and endless blue sky. Only in adulthood would I know what that could stand for: “As above, so below.”
Kneeling on pillows of green moss, I would cup the cold, bubbling water in my hands and drink to my heart’s content. Drinking that water was my becoming one with that place, with the universe… drinking it all in was like a sacrament, though then I did not have the word for it. Then, I’d catch tadpoles and try to stroke the frogs, all the while, watching for snakes. Like small shovels, my hands made trenches in the moist earth near the pool; the trenches filled with spring water, making small rivers and inlets into which the tadpoles swam.
There was also a mysterious house in the woods, with equally mysterious people who lived there. I had seen the couple as they walked the perimeter of their property—the Robertsons. My father had spoken with the older couple. She wore a wide-brimmed straw hat, and he wore a hard hat like the one worn by “Ramar of the Jungle,” a TV show.
I was so taken with this world behind my yard that I selected special friends from school to come and visit. They were as thrilled as I was to see these sights. It was as if they were on a tour and I was the tour guide.
I didn’t have the nerve to go to the Robertsons’ house. It sat in an open area, with grapevines all around it and a rose garden in the middle, where a pedestal held a shiny green ball the size of a basketball that reflected the sunlight. I wanted to hold the ball.
But on one day of my guided tours of this fantasy land, I felt especially confident and led us to the porch of this house. Dare I knock on the door?
Tomorrow I will reflect on what happened on the porch. But before I tell you what happened on that porch, I want to tell you what happened when, only a few months ago, I returned to that place—my childhood soul’s home.
Only a few months ago, Lark and I went to Mobile for a dear friend’s memorial service. After the service, we drove into the area that was my soul’s home… It is now a well-established subdivision. Houses stand where the oaks, sassafras, and wild azaleas once grew. A home sits near the place where the hidden spring bubbled from the earth. The gullies have been filled, the fields bulldozed, the secret rooms of vines and thickets erased. My trails were now streets and other people’s backyards. For a moment, I could almost see Sparkle running ahead of me again. Her little bones lay only a few yards away in sacred space in the backyard that will always be mine.
In the subdivision, I saw children playing in their backyards and had an absurd urge to stop the car and tell them about the enchanted land beneath their feet—rabbits, possums, the spring and its pool, gullies, hidden rooms, and open fields. I could imagine them running inside: “Mommy, some man riding by in a car with his wife just told us there used to be a whole other world in our backyard.”
That world was gone… But was it? I still felt it… I smelled it, I saw it…the same feelings, sensations, sights, and sounds from decades—no, lifetimes—ago. I could never say that land had vanished because its enchantments and stirrings of my soul had been recorded and stored in my body to nurture me all during my life. This is why I believe that the embodied soul is our deepest nature—our truest home.
Spiritual Practice and Inquiry
What memories might you have of your soul’s home? Illustrate it in verse, or in any medium. What is the effect on you as you come closer to your embodied soul?
Prayer
Dear God,
Thank you for the nudge back home a few months ago. I touched many places in my heart that I had long forgotten—places that make me feel absolutely at home.
Amen
