As we drove, the wind swept past my face, calling up unbidden a now familiar ache. It's the same ache I feel when I'm on the trails behind campus or when someone's arms are around my waist. A feeling of both longing and transient security, a desire for something that I can fit no name to and am unable to fully describe. Sometimes I think that this sense of lack is a desire for the Divine, and at others, that it's simply depression. But then it passes, fading out undying like a candle slowly guttering, and I am left wondering what it was I was thinking while in the betwixt and between. My practical self will tell what's left that I am merely feeling self pity for not being able to obtain whatever it was I wanted but couldn't have. But then the ache will return, and I know it's not self pity. At these times, "lost" echoes through the empty space which the ache creates.

I am going home tomorrow. It will be good to be there, to see family and friends. I would be ungrateful if I did not feel so. But the knowledge that I don't belong anymore, and at the same time, that I have been irrevocably formed and will always carry some of it with me, will not be shaken.

We did discuss living vs survival the other night, in the welcome darkness, with our cups of hot drink.  Survival can produce nothing but life, and that alone. The rational soul desires to live, to create, to do something beyond the mere functions of survival. This is the reason for even the most primitive societies have music and dance, art and story. Man has something within him which presses him to do more that simply survive.