Finding My Way Home

“Can’t Find My Way Home” by Blind Faith was on one of the well-played cassette tapes in Dad’s car when I was growing up.

In my teens when I got into guitar and signing, I taught myself the song and performed it at youth group open mic. I think I liked the melody, and that it seemed to have potent deeper meaning.

The song has been revisiting me lately as I’ve been picking up the guitar again. Now it reminds me how it felt to have this yearning that was so strong, yet I didn’t know how to express, let alone have an orientation to finding that way home.

As I find more of a sense of being at home in this body and personality called “Megumi Burr-Tolliver,” I recognize that desire to come home in myself was there in my teen self, and has continued to direct my path over the decades since.

A yearning to “come home” was likely there in the song’s writer, Steve Winwood, at age 21 when the song came out in 1969. It was there in the hippie culture as they were drawn to deeper truth and wisdom than what the mainstream offered.

This song likely resonated at some level with a yearning in my dad. He plowed headstrong the path of a responsible family man, seeming along the way to lose sight of openhearted presence and deeper connection with life.

That I so strongly sought this presence and connection on my own path, seems to me not only part of my own personal healing, but also a healing of the separation that I believe haunted my dad and generations of ancestors.

As I am finding my way home, I at the same time am more at home in this imperfect human body and personality that I live in.

Today, in response to the call and opening from the hippies, more and more pointers to the path “home” have become accessible. I see more and more of us on the ongoing path of becoming “at home” in the truth of who we are, as we are.

I added two phrases to my own version of the end of the song. I am on my way home, and I know that I am home.