At Home in the World Quotes

“Two opposing things can be equally true. Counting the days till Christmas doesn't mean we hate Halloween. I go to church on Sundays, and still hold the same faith at the pub on Saturday night. I shamelessly play a steady stream of eighties pop music and likewise have an undying devotion to Chopin. And perhaps most significantly: I love to travel and I love my home.”
― Tsh Oxenreider, At Home in the World: Reflections on Belonging While Wandering the Globe

“I know, in my soul, that a love for travel is a gift and not a hindrance. It feels like a burden when the bucket list is bigger than the bank account, but a thirst for more of the world is not something to apologize for. Denying its presence feels like denying something good in me, something God put there. Wanderlust has a reputation as the epitome of unrequited love, something the young and naive chase after because they don’t yet realize it’s as futile as a dog chasing its tail. Turns out, ever-burning wanderlust is a good thing.”
― Tsh Oxenreider, At Home in the World: Reflections on Belonging While Wandering the Globe

“Tea drinking is a liturgy of comfort, and we partake of it everywhere in the world. It’s a ceremony of simplicity, nourishment for both the nomads in foreign teahouses and homebodies in their beds.”
― Tsh Oxenreider, At Home in the World: Reflections on Belonging While Wandering the Globe

“This world is huge; it is majestic; it is worth exploring just for the sake of knowing it.”
― Tsh Oxenreider, At Home in the World: Reflections on Belonging While Wandering the Globe

“I wanted to sink into the unpredictability of a cross-cultural life, yes, but I also wanted a bona-fide home. This was a season of refinement, of acknowledging there were multiple sides to me that were equally true.

I was infected with an incurable sense of wanderlust, but I was also a homebody. I matured into adulthood when I acknowledged this truth.”
― Tsh Oxenreider, At Home in the World: Reflections on Belonging While Wandering the Globe

“Nobody can discover the world for someone else. Only when we discover it for ourselves does it become common ground and a common bond and we cease to be alone. —Wendell Berry”
― Tsh Oxenreider, At Home in the World: Reflections on Belonging While Wandering the Globe

“The French writer Antoine de Saint-Exupéry once said, “Love doesn’t mean gazing at each other, but looking, together, in the same direction.”
― Tsh Oxenreider, At Home in the World: Reflections on Belonging While Wandering the Globe

“Sometimes, even when I'm standing on a remarkable slice of terra firma, I'm besotted with wanderlust, my heart thumping for the next unknown place and my mind wondering what's next. But right now, in this rain forest, floating in crystal waters after a walk on ancient, sacred soil with my flesh and blood, I want to be nowhere else. Nowhere. This, right now, is home. I can hear God through the rustling of the prehistoric fan shaped leaves, the scurry of alien insects on the bark, the familiar laughter of my children slipping on stones in the water. Everything here is unfamiliar, but it's familiar. We are transient, vagabonds, and yet we're tethered.”
― Tsh Oxenreider, At Home in the World: Reflections on Belonging While Wandering the Globe

“Traveling means touching, tasting, smelling the world.”
― Tsh Oxenreider, At Home in the World: Reflections on Belonging While Wandering the Globe

“We may not have soul mates in this life, but most of us have my-God-if-I-don't-walk-through-the-rest-of-my-life-with-that-person-I'm-an-idiot mates.”
― Tsh Oxenreider, At Home in the World: Reflections on Belonging While Wandering the Globe

“I lived in a second-floor apartment on a nameless street in a village of a thousand people who seemed suspended in time.”
― Tsh Oxenreider, At Home in the World: Reflections on Belonging While Wandering the Globe

“Wanderlust is never truly quenched—as C. S. Lewis famously penned, “If we find ourselves with a desire that nothing in this world can satisfy, the most probable explanation is that we were made for another world.”
― Tsh Oxenreider, At Home in the World: Reflections on Belonging While Wandering the Globe

“home. I grow restless with the humdrum of small, ordinary life, but know it’s in those hours of sorting socks and vacuuming the car where most of life is meant to be lived.”
― Tsh Oxenreider, At Home in the World: Reflections on Belonging While Wandering the Globe

“If I could, I'd take the food and art of Italy, for example, couple it with the quiet, understated personality of France and the orderliness of Germany, the cinematic and literary wit of Britain, and blend it into one utopian, and ultimately dystopian, probably, civilization.”
― Tsh Oxenreider, At Home in the World: Reflections on Belonging While Wandering the Globe

“You live in a world of noise,' Nora says. 'Your work is noisy. Your home life with three kids is noisy. God speaks to us best in silence, in nooks and crannies when we're willing to ignore the cacophony.”
― Tsh Oxenreider, At Home in the World: Reflections on Belonging While Wandering the Globe

“Hong Kong is completely cool, straddling the Western world and its preeminence as the wealthiest spot in Asia. She fully embraces who she is. She is the older cousin in town for holidays, whom you awkwardly admire from across the family table. She is quirky; she is fun; she is serious; she is not to be taken lightly. She is into art. We”
― Tsh Oxenreider, At Home in the World: Reflections on Belonging While Wandering the Globe

“Broad, wholesome, charitable views of men and things cannot be acquired by vegetating in one little corner of the earth all of one’s lifetime.”
― Tsh Oxenreider, At Home in the World: Reflections on Belonging While Wandering the Globe

“Africa is red dirt, camels hugging highway shoulders, blushing skies, waterfall drizzle, intricate glass tiles on the wall. But really, it’s people. It’s hosts serving postmeal popcorn, kids laughing in the grass, grown men laughing at terrible kid jokes, neighbors loving neighbors. Africa is shared community. It’s one billion people on the planet. It is the welcoming family of humanity. Cradle of civilization, indeed.”
― Tsh Oxenreider, At Home in the World: Reflections on Belonging While Wandering the Globe

“For what you see and hear depends a good deal on where you are standing: it also depends on what sort of person you are. —C. S. Lewis”
― Tsh Oxenreider, At Home in the World: Reflections on Belonging While Wandering the Globe

“I feel at home in the world, and I feel like Alice falling down a rabbit hole.”
― Tsh Oxenreider, At Home in the World: Reflections on Belonging While Wandering the Globe

“I decide that candor is probably best, that I will never see this woman again after this month. “I’m honestly not sure why I’m here, other than I feel like I could use some spiritual direction in my life.” This is the truth. “Why do you feel that way?” Nora asks. I sit for a few seconds, because this is a good question. I’m not terribly sure, other than my soul is weary, my usual recipe of prayer and reflecting on passages from the Bible isn’t inspiring me, and I sense a gaping, run-ragged hole in my soul where mature wisdom should be. Also, I don’t know where my home is, where I might really belong. Years have passed since I last felt poured-into, I tell her, and I have not bothered to seek it out. I have embarked on this year of travel, at age thirty-seven, feeling less confident than I did a decade ago about what I believe to be true, and how that truth intersects with who I am. I am weary from game playing and formulaic answers, and the evangelical-Christian hat that I have worn daily with every outfit since I was fourteen feels too small, headache inducing. I fidget daily in its discomfort, but I don’t know how to exchange it, how it should be resized. Perhaps I can stitch a new hat from scraps I find scattered around the globe, I suggest. Perhaps she could be my milliner, maybe help me find the first scrap, floating somewhere along the sidewalks of old Chiang”
― Tsh Oxenreider, At Home in the World: Reflections on Belonging While Wandering the Globe

“Sri Lanka isn't near anywhere else we are visiting, and neither Kyle nor I know anyone here. We don't know that much about it, either, and when we planned our trip months ago, we noticed it was an even stop between the Australian and African continents, and huh - I wonder what it's like? That seemed like a good enough reason to stop, and so, we are here because it's here. It exists. It floats in the Indian Ocean, and teardrop south of India, and there probably won't be another time we'll fly across it.”
― Tsh Oxenreider, At Home in the World: Reflections on Belonging While Wandering the Globe

“Thai food tastes like ocean and timeworn tradition, fields of basil and groves of mango. Streetwise cooks in aprons and flip-flops stir salty tamarind through rice noodles and hand patrons limes to squeeze over their bowls Paired with glugs of Singha bubbling water and it is the best three-dollar investment of your life.”
― Tsh Oxenreider, At Home in the World: Reflections on Belonging While Wandering the Globe

“I want to see a thousand tiny places, smell their flowers, and taste the sauces made by their people. I want to feel the difference between the textures of grit in Sri Lanka and Morocco. I want to meet the woman who bakes the best bread i n the smallest town in New Zealand. I want to find the best vantage point to see Bosnia from Croatia. What do the Grand Marnier crepes taste like in Rouen? In Paris? There are untold numbers of tiny places and extraordinary people who occupy them. We will perhaps see a hundred of both.”
― Tsh Oxenreider, At Home in the World: Reflections on Belonging While Wandering the Globe

“Something is missing. Our inner adventurers hug the walls as shadows, eclipsed by parental and culturally expected responsibility. I still think of myself as a vagabond, and yet these days I only travel for work. I am a writer and Kyle works from home for a small company, but we feel the heaviness of our ordinary life. It is a reasonable weight; we aren't overcommitted, and I am mightily grateful for the years of exploration behind us. But our existence is still heavy with midlife expectations.”
― Tsh Oxenreider, At Home in the World: Reflections on Belonging While Wandering the Globe

“A love for travel, to explore new places and foods and cultures, to sleep on the cheap in the world's grandest cities, doesn't mean you're not family material. It means you're one of the more honest parents in the car-pool line.”
― Tsh Oxenreider, At Home in the World: Reflections on Belonging While Wandering the Globe

“Here—this corner of the tapestry. This is why you are who you are.” We are learning presence, how to delight in each other’s mere existence, muster affection in spite of our quirks. As Hemingway says, “Never go on trips with anyone you do not love.”1”
― Tsh Oxenreider, At Home in the World: Reflections on Belonging While Wandering the Globe

“Sometimes it helps to ask a fellow sojourner if she can see through the fog in front of you.”
― Tsh Oxenreider, At Home in the World: Reflections on Belonging While Wandering the Globe

“I’m not terribly sure, other than my soul is weary, my usual recipe of prayer and reflecting on passages from the Bible isn’t inspiring me, and I sense a gaping, run-ragged hole in my soul where mature wisdom should be. Also, I don’t know where my home is, where I might really belong.”
― Tsh Oxenreider, At Home in the World: Reflections on Belonging While Wandering the Globe

“Nobody seems to embark on a massive journey because their lives are already full of meaning.”
― Tsh Oxenreider, At Home in the World: Reflections on Belonging While Wandering the Globe