Growing up in a small suburban town just north of Chattanooga, TN didn’t provide much in terms of entertainment for an adventurous little boy like myself. Video games and movies held my attention for mere minutes before I was out the back door and “lost” in what little woods we had in the subdivision, not to be seen again until dinnertime. So when my father first took me up through this incredible river gorge in the Cherokee National Forest to the Ocoee Whitewater Center, I had found where I belonged. The Ocoee river was the coolest and most fascinating thing I’d seen to date, and it captured my imagination with its swift movements and the culture surrounding it.
Over the years I’ve spent so many days out in the gorge – happy days, sad days, days I escaped the world, days it found me anyways, days introducing others to its joy and even days of making peace with myself and with things I could not control. The Ocoee became my haven, the river in which, to me at least, peace itself flowed. So strong its pull on my heart that even moving to Montréal could not keep me away for long, even if only in my mind. In my meditation practice, I was often asked “where we’re you just now?” and I couldn’t have been more proud to tell them about the homeplace of my heart.
For now, I am repatriated and in a hard, transitory season of life where the future is unclear and time seems to at once rush away from me and yet stand completely still. But there’s a ray of light in the dark: the Ocoee is now only a twenty minute drive away instead of 1,100 miles. It’s little wonder I’m hardly at my house these days. The most common answer to “Where’s Aaron?” is “oh, he’s gone home.” And so will I continue to go home throughout my life so long as the crystal white waters of the Ocoee flow, be it through my mind or through my toes outstretched in the current!
“Every heart must have a home
it can find when feeling low,
where the memories of the good times cheer the soul!
It can be a place or time
that brings healing to the mind –
It’s the homeplace of the heart,
It’s the place we all would go!”
– excerpt from “A Circuit Rider’s Wife” by Jim Burns, local bass-baritone, composer, librettist, and friend.