Ten years, a beginning
In migratory birds, there is a phenomenon whereby, unknown to science as to why, some birds migrate in the opposite direction they should. Most such birds, traveling to unseasonable conditions, perish. Some over subsequent years seem to right themselves, eventually following the rest of the flock to more suitable climbs. Rarer still are those birds who adapt, making the hostile conditions their permanent wintering grounds. This is known as reverse migration.
Unlike most migration stories, I did not come to more from less. It is still the West, but America is hardly a place of deprivation, or desperation from which to escape. Though not particularly uncommon, I have shared this experience with few migrants here, as most I’ve encountered fit the more traditional model, fleeing their homelands for freedom. Mine was more of a lateral move, but from more to less, nonetheless. “Aye, there’s the rub…”, as the uniqueness of my particular experience has puzzled even many Australians. “Why did you leave America, to come here…?”
The aforementioned analogy is not to suggest that Australia is an inhospitable place. The nature of migration has as much to do with the migrant, and how the two come together, culminating in how the migrant adapts, both to their new world, and the world to their new selves. Some prefer a more colonial approach, and the blood stained pages of history amply demonstrate that there is considerable precedent for this. I personally have mixed feelings about kicking down doors, and some of my first impressions of Australia, as a genuine outworlder is that it is no place for white people. I struggled initially with the feeling after the fact that it was in a way very presumptuous of me to have come here at all. Yet the choices that brought me here were among those that left me little choice but to remain.
Today marks 10 years of my present Australian odyssey, my own story of migration. Like others mine is a story of transformation. Of love, birth, loss and redemption, of innocence lost and innocence regained, only to be challenged over and over again; a cross-planetary voyage, from one’s place of origin, to come home. This is something that I think everyone, to some extent, can identify with, though I know a few Australians, who though completely agreeing, upon reading this far, inexplicably, I imagine are pretty much seething by now. Not entirely unlike when talking to an American about the benefits of gun control, but I digress…
To come home… But what is home? Is it the land? The people, with whom we will share experiences & develop traditions, and who will bear witness to our life? Family, natural, extended, and/or acquired? The self, alone, wherever one might find themselves? While it means differently to everyone, somewhere between need, desire, expectation, realisation and acceptance is hopefully a sense of peace, of belonging, and perhaps this is what we all mean when we call a place home. Perhaps then we are all, always and forever, coming home.
And perhaps it is in the migrant’s journey that this becomes uniquely apparent. Unable to take anything for granted, the migrant finds meaning initially in everything, from the significant to the mundane, as they develop a new relationship with things a native has long since found ordinary. A curious ache of an insatiable variety soon overcomes, if not overwhelms, as reasoned thought and the initial experiences can not hope to assuage the effect on the body, of hunger for memory. Those things, people and experiences of particular value in the need for connection, found or created find a special place in our everyday life, for in that is the difference between being somewhere, and being home.
It is said that it takes 10 years to migrate to a new country. 10 years ago I of course couldn’t know what that means. But today, I am home. And despite the transience of those who I thought, or had hoped would figure prominently in and on this day, I am home. It seems ironically fitting that a day of such magnitude for me personally is commemorated mostly in cyberspace, as a migrant’s journey – at least this migrant – is first a personal one, and these are times where we share our lives at a distance. The modern world, having grown smaller and bigger at the same time in the digital era has found those at a distance as close as the heart, and those near by to be simply too far away.
So I reach out to you, one and all, “with malice toward none, with charity for all”, to share my story about today. To speak of what it has meant, and what it has become for me, to be home, after 10 years, finally home, in Australia. It began as a love story, and despite “the heart-ache and the thousand natural shocks that flesh is heir to”, it is still a love story. 10 years later, this is the beginning.
To be continued…
