So I moved. Starting from May 12, 2011 when I graduated college, my trajectory has been: California Town 1, California Town 2, Florida, Alaska, Florida, California Town 2, Washington D.C. House 1, Washington D.C. House 2, Virginia, California Town 2.

That’s 10 locations in three years, many of the moves involving cross-country treks. I have lived a lot of places for school, jobs, family, romance, and friends, but I have started to realize that I don’t yet know why I would stay anywhere in particular. In a world of Goethian continual motion, what makes one 'somewhere' preferable? Or perhaps to fall back on the human context: The Odyssey recounts the vast human and divine effort necessary not to engage in war, but to bring a man home. In fact, most of our great epics center around two motions. The first motion is that of leaving home: The Iliad, The Aeneid, Paradise Lost, Canterbury Tales, The Vulsung Saga. The second motion is that of returning home: The Odyssey, Beowulf, Gilgamesh. The Divine Comedy occupies a unique place: By ending with the Beatific Vision, Dante finds himself both farther from and nearer to home than he ever was at the beginning of his journey. In fact, in Dante’s case, it was only after being exiled from home that he reached his eternal home, which cycle provides a pretty good summary of the Christian life.

There are certainly benefits to all this travel: I’ve seen cities and towns with a population of no one. I have seen towns in the Midwest, across both coasts, the plains, the mountains, the South, the deserts, and in swamps. I have lived in small towns and large ones, in diverse neighborhoods and ones with population demographic: young professional. There’s a lot to see in this world, if you take a look. One of the oddest places to live was Washington D.C., because no one is “from” the District, and while it’s a place to get a start, I don’t know if many people will “stay” there. It made loose ties an odd sort of thingpeople, myself included, were constantly arriving or departing. People come and go in New York as well, but New York City is also a place that people fall in love with, possibly more so than they will with any person in the City. I fell in love with itnot enough to stay forever, but enough to always want to come back.

I suspect that the difference is that New York was a place people landed, while D.C. was a place America created. Perhaps this is unfair, but then I live in neither. I could go into the details of my loves and challenges across the country, but the cities have an odd way of uniting common American themes while retaining utterly unique cores: Boston, Detroit, Atlanta, Philadelphia, Nashville, Miami, Chicago, Dallas, Tulsa, Denver, Provo, Seattle, Portland, San Fransisco, Los Angeles, Anchorage, Honolulu: all providing radically unique instances of life, shaped by the place they are, yet retaining certain implicit markers as “American Cities.”

Meanwhile, I have also seen small townstowns out in Oklahoma where hospitality is the byword, towns from Utah to Florida to Pennsylvania to Michigan formed by an impulse to live a shared faith, towns in Northern California where you just wander around the woods at night, beach towns with bonfires and hippies, ski towns, ag towns, mountain towns, and small towns that provide a glimpse into the long-standing sort of community I can only imagine from Gilmore Girls. You don’t fall in love with them in the same way you fall in love with the Cities. The cities have a certain allure and mesmerizing glamour about them. You fall in love with them in a heady, passionate, and highly emotional way. They act as a macrocosm encompassing all the microcosmic facets and communities of human life. Small towns, on the other hand, actually love you back. The ones that manage to stay strong and vibrant do so because they create a community that inspires her inhabitants to want to engage her,even if that means to go without some of the glitz. Small towns are the best friend you never realized you had fallen in love with, until, one moment, there you are: completely happy.

Jane Jacobs, in her beautiful work The Death and Life of Great American Cities, warns us that:

It is fruitless, however to search for some dramatic key element or kingpin, which, if made clear, will clarify all. No single element in a city is, in truth, the kingpin of the key. The mixture itself is the kingpin, and its mutual support is the order.

This seems a truth to apply to towns as well. There is no single element that causes anyone to stay, but I must suppose it would feel as if you are coming home.

The rub is, while observing the broadness of living, I feel a bit like my namesake Marina, the Little Mermaid of Hans Christian Andersen's fairytale, or his Little Match Girl: regulated to the role of observer and not participant. However, I suppose you could say, at least I’m not as sad as those characters. Our society does encourage us to go anywhere and be anythingwhether to follow a purpose or to chase larks. Which is fine and oftentimes good, but it does have a cost: namely, stability.

I have met friends all over this country, but each new place I always have days where I look at my new insurance sheet and wonder who exactly will be my emergency contact. I attend orphan Thanksgivings and Easters, and I love my friends at those so much, but I also think about when it used to be the whole family. The cost of moving is that you uproot yourself, and it can take time to acclimatize and root yourself into the new community.

My friend Gracy Olmstead beautifully articulated this problem, over at The American Conservative:

Modern society fosters the idea of personhood as a singular thing: we believe that living in community is not necessary, though often beneficial. Social obligation and community are voluntary: they can and should be discarded whenever convenient for the individual ... If Aristotle was right [that man is a social animal], we still need community, and cannot merely shrug off this craving for human interaction. The old pleasures of breaking bread and eating in communion, working side-by-side with friends and family, enjoying times of labor and leisure together—yearnings for such things will always simmer beneath the surface of our souls.

Olmstead absolutely is correct. I love that I have traveled, but to do so indefinitely, to remain unrooted, would be ultimately unhuman. To be human is to join with others, to find a community and work towards a good outside yourself. I think that the modern idea of the individual in isolation encourages us to reject ties such as family, friendship, and love in favor of autonomy. The painful fact is, though, that man, always or for the most part, was not made to reside alone perpetually.

I doubt that I have made my final move. That in itself isn’t bad. However, I do know that my goal is not to wander indefinitely, but like Odysseus or Dante to eventually reach the place I would call home. This would be a time to quote a certain Oxford professor of linguistics, but I’ll refrain myself. Further, that quote would not be quite right. Rather, I will quote my favorite Oxford professor of mathematics, who has an apt ability to express my internal questions:

“Would you tell me, please, which way I ought to go from here?"

"That depends a good deal on where you want to get to."

"I don't much care where –"

"Then it doesn't matter which way you go.”

Or, to put more things generally in the words of Flogging Molly, “I don’t know where I’m going.” But I do hope that one day I will reach a place and realize I have finally come home. In spite of my fear that all this wandering fails a certain part of my human-ness in lieu of personal convenience, that longing for home is reassuring in that it is an utterly human desire. Home, where we find our place, is where we find community. But communities fade, and change, and even the most stable are never certain. It is this infinite potency effecting the material world, I suspect, that prompted  a great saint to write: “Our hearts are restless until they rest in Thee.”