Where is HomeCountry?

‘HomeCountry’ was the way my friend Tim used to say it, when he was describing the dry, red, scrubby country in outback South Australia where he grew up. Didn’t matter that he hadn’t lived there for decades. His surname was on the wall of the William Creek Pub, and his name and family were known by anyone you met out that way. I’d travelled through that country when my ‘Parish’ was the whole of outback South Australia. But I’m a whitefella, travelling through for a few years: was it my HomeCountry? I wrote 200,000 words of my PhD on this very question: how can whitefellas come to ‘belong’ in Australia, how do folk like me find ‘HomeCountry’? And its not like HomeCountry is some nostalgic image lost to time. This image of Lake Eyre flooding in 2025 is one of Tim’s, when he flew over it surveying damage to the roads he hsa graded. HomeCountry can change as much as culture does, while also holding continuity, and stories of connection that stretch into the past and into the future. One of my Mindfulness teachers, Thich Nhat Hahn, wrote a gatha in the Plum Village style that hangs at the entry of the Plum Village community he established in France when he was exiled from his homeland (a linguistic relative of HomeCountry) in Vietnam during the American war in Vietnam. It reads: You have Arrived; you are Home. The longer poem continues: ‘In the Here, and In the Now.’ It stopped me in my tracks and I breathed it in many a mindful practice. How do you talk of Arrival and Home when you are in exile? But Thay’s understanding was simple: We Arrive at the Island of our Self. We are Home in our Body and our Breath. And our Body, like our Breath, like our Self, is a node of the larger breathing, living planet with which we live in radical interbeing. There is actually nowhere we can go to be away from this larger body of life to which we belong. Which brings me nicely full circle back to my preaching days, when I would wax lyrical (I imagined) on my favorite Psalm, 139: Where can I flee from your presence? If I go up to the heavens, you are there; if I make my bed in the depths, you are there. If I rise on the wings of the dawn, if I settle on the far side of the sea, even there your hand will guide me, your right hand will hold me fast.’ Where is HomeCountry? It is everywhere we are, and it is everywhere within us. It is a state of being connected to ourself, to eachother, to the planet, and to life itself. If you feel exiled in any way, come home. There’s a heart(h) waiting for you there.

Tracy