Some thoughts on homesickness Homesickness is waking in the night and realizing your alone...turning to the space where your wife would be and seeing a wall. Homesickness is missing the spooning of your bodies. The comfort in the knowledge that you are loved and embraced. Homesickness is missing the smell of your wife's hair...the sound of your children laughing...the banging of the front door. Homesickness is the feeling of an elastic band that joins you to the ones you love...an elastic stretched so tight around the globe...that every movement makes you aware of it's fragility...every second you listen out for a snap. Homesickness is the sound of native birds...and in my case (being from Australia) the smell of Eucalyptus. Homesickness is cooking for one instead of five. The smells from the kitchen. The afternoon cup of tea...a pot at the ready waiting for Jane to come home from work. The evening light. The children home from school...the asking of the standard question "how was your day?" and the standard answer "good". Homesickness is missing the grave of your dog...even though when you were there your could hardly bear to even go in the backyard let alone to look directly at it...a feeling that you have somehow betrayed her by leaving her grave in another country. Homesickness is a feeling of being weak at the knees...of being stooped of shoulder...of being only partially present where ever you go. Homesickness is a feeling of incompleteness...a yearning for the mundane...a crazy nostalgia for the day to day grind that you had so yearned to escape from. Homesickness is real...though it's all in my head...I don't know where else my reality resides...Though not just the head. Homesickness is in the bones, your stomach, the heart, your liver, the kidneys. You would trade any organ to take away the dull ache. Homesickness is the certainty that you are not alone...but alone in that thought nonetheless. Homesickness travels faster than light across time and space. It catches at your clothes as you walk through the woods. It looks at you from the eyes of a child. It is a dog tied up outside a shop...waiting patiently for it's owner...a bicycle leaning against a wall...a tiny bird in a tree going about it's business. But most of all Homesickness is a call to go out and enjoy the new place that you find yourself in. To embrace change and honour the ones you've left behind by enjoying the moment and living in the now. Homesickness comes in waves...it has an ebb and a flow...the trick is to know when the tide is out and you can scamper across the rocks to a previously undiscovered rock pool and take the time to marvel at the sea anemones...and head safely back to sure before the tide turns.