Freedom from Exile: The Gift Outright

Jun 14, 2004, 12.00am IST

Destiny and the dynamics of living often remove us from the place we belong to, from what we refer to as our hometown. Living away, we tend to get "hometown-sick".


We split ourselves, and suffer a 'body here, mind there' syndrome. Interestingly, this can happen not just to an individual or a family, but even collectively to a whole people.

Take the plight of America's founding fathers. Mostly victims of religious persecution, they dared to cross the Atlantic to found a new settlement. They fled bodily, but mentally, they remained in England.

Many American cities reflect this nostalgia. England's York became New York. The new Americans sought liberty, but could not free themselves of their emo-tional bondage to the "mother country".

America became a colony of England. The immigrants had to fend for themselves, often under harsh conditions. England was a distant past, yet they saw themselves as subjects of the British government.

They suffered governmental apathy and grave injustice for over 100 years, until one day they said, enough is enough. They realised that they were victims of their own mindset.

A slight mental adjustment made them to realise that they were, in fact, an entity by themselves. This eventually led to the American Declaration of Independence.

Robert Frost has succinctly summed up this realisation in a brief poem titled The Gift Outright. He says: "The land was ours before we were the land's./ She was our land more than a hundred years/ Before we were her people. She was ours... But we were England's, still colonials,/ Possessing what we still were unpossessed by,/ Possessed by what we now no more possessed..."

It took them 100 years to comprehend the folly of not surrendering to the land that was their home. The poem says: "Something we were withholding made us weak/ Until we found out it was ourselves/ We were withholding from the land of our living."

So they surrendered, and "forthwith found salvation in surrender". This was the American people gifting themselves to the American land. What followed, of course, is history.

Many of us are employed and are living in places we are prejudiced to believe is not our home. We live in a state of exile, longing for the day when we shall get back to our 'home-place'.

We poison our minds with thoughts of imagined alienation. So much so, we do not tend with loving care the house we live in, although we may be living in it for long, just because it is a leased house or, worse, a 'government quarter'.

This is not our house - we corrupt our minds into believing - our house is where we have built it, thousands of miles away. Finally, maybe after retirement, if and when we do get back to the home-place, we hardly feel at home, what with so much changed, and the change often not to our liking.

We feel even more miserable than before. We wonder, what went wrong? Frost, perhaps, would say, Friend, why did you withhold yourself all your life? If only you had surrendered to the place of your living, it might have been a different story!

If we begin to view the local people we are destined to live amidst (for whatever length of time) as our people, we learn to feel at home always.

If we evince a little interest and involvement in our neighbourhood, we discover an exciting world. Home is where the heart is. If you force your heart away from your place of living, the place of your destiny, you invite misery upon yourself. Homesickness, like any other sickness, incapacitates a person. It corrupts the joy of life.

K S Ram