63 / Can't Feel At Home

When I was in high school, I taught myself to play the banjo (to a degree), by paging religiously through the Pete Seeger guide and seeing what I could do. And I listened to a lot of folk and country music, including specifically music sung by The Carter Family. Their tunes, it seems, just stuck in my head.

One tune that stuck was a gospel folk song entitled, "Can't Feel At Home." And that was the song that popped to mind when I arrived back in Santa Cruz after my long, globe-trotting travels.

My "Two World Hypothesis," that we live in two worlds simultaneously (one that we create, and one that we don't: the world of Nature, or the world that God created) may or may not relate directly to the theology of the folk song. But as I think about it, one reason that we might not "feel at home" in this world, is that we have radically misunderstood its nature, thinking that the world we create, and most directly inhabit, is the only world there is.

Thinking that is a big mistake. I know that much.

I am going to keep working on the "two world" problem. Figuring it all out is just as painfully hard as it was to learn the banjo.

And for those who don't know the song, there are lots of different treatments, available on the Internet, though I wasn't able to track down one featuring The Carter Family itself.