We have no control over where we’re born. Place, however, has a sacred significance. Many people have a sense of where they belong. Life may be a prolonged journey, like that of a salmon, to find one’s way there. While in seminary, one of my professors had the class introduce itself by name and town of birth. This was in Boston, at a school with a highly eclectic student body. I was born in the small town of Franklin, Pennsylvania. Other than having been the setting for an X-Files episode may years later (not filmed there, of course), it was not the kind of place anyone was likely to have heard of. In a class of maybe 50, imagine my surprise when an older gentleman announced he was born in Franklin, Pennsylvania. We was not of my generation, but it turns out, we had origins in common. As the introduction passed further forward, someone about ten years my senior announced, with a glance at the first student, that he was from Franklin as well. By the time it reached me, this seemed more of a synchronicity than a mere coincidence. We were all entering Juniors (the starting year of seminary), all born in the same hospital, and none of us had known the others existed prior to that day.
I was in Boston, however, because of a deep-down conviction that I belonged in New England. More specifically, Maine. After having grown up for about a decade in Franklin, we moved to Rouseville, Pennsylvania when my mother remarried. Apart from the industrial, drug-intensive culture, there was a haunting sense that this was not where I belonged. I began to read voraciously. My literary adventures found my spiritual home: Maine. Vividly I could imagine its rocky coasts and large stretches of northern woodland. I had never been to Maine—had never even seen the ocean at that point—but I knew, without a doubt, that Maine was my spiritual home. While a student in Boston I made several trips to Maine, each one convincing me more that I shouldn’t be leaving when Sunday afternoon rolled around. I should be staying here.
Life has, however, kept me from my beloved Maine. Academic jobs, mythical beasts that they are, are location-specific. You have to follow the jobs (I almost wrote herd there, but there’s nothing close to a herd of such employment). The population of Maine doesn’t support the number of schools that places like Massachusetts, New York, and Pennsylvania do. Even all of these were closed to me. Maine never abandoned my dreams. I moved to Wisconsin, following a job that abandoned me. I moved to New Jersey to take another, which also abandoned me. One of the motifs to which I constantly return is the sacredness of place. A sense that a person belongs somewhere. Out in the ocean, many salmon are captured before they make it to the stream of their birth. I wonder what their thoughts might be as they lie gasping for breath, knowing deep in their piscine souls, that this is not where they were meant to be.