Home

All scientists, philosophers, poets, politicians and everyone else perhaps, are wrong. They all have said it wrong about the idea of home. Home, is not here, nor is there, nor used to be. Earth is not home. Countries are not home. I have been misled by my dreams and of my mother, and by the stories she told, and by the books I have read. England or the United Kingdom is not my home, nor is Malaysia, nor is China, nor is Africa. Home is not geographical, nor is it political. It is ontological. It is the urge to be at home everywhere. Home, it is wherever we want to go to, but is where we can find a place to stay – for a while. We set up 'home' in impermanent places such as Earth. We all perhaps are aliens, once or twice or maybe more, flourished and reincarnated over many other planets that in the end were torched by their dying stars. Together we were vaporised and blasted into atoms, carried by cosmic winds, trapped inside comets, and then descended on Earth, in which we evolved once more and misconceived this rock as home, and misguided by our histories, our emotions, our languages, our ancient tales, anthems and songs, that we never forget, that we are taught to guard and fortify our mountains and pastures with bows, arrows, spears, and chariots, to keep away the lowly and satanic countenance from our green and pleasant land. We are mere star stuff, caught with each others in the net of life and time, fellow prisoners of the splendour and travail of the Earth. We all are humble migrants that once were atoms forged in the blistering furnaces deep inside stars, blown across unimaginable gulfs of space and time by the wind between the stars. One day, when Earth dies, we will migrate to another planet; when our galaxy dies, we will migrate to another galaxy; when our universe dies, we will migrate to another universe. When we look back in the future one day, we will realise this: we all are travelers and creatures of distance. Journey is home. Exploration is home. Working is home. Migration is home. Road, is home - where we keep running to, where in every trip, our memory returns to the point of origin which we promise our parents, our children, our love ones and friends, that we will come back to each others.

21.03.2013, 04:50 pm, Thursday.