I don’t know what it is exactly, but whenever I return to Germany, from anywhere in the world, it just feels “good“. Every single time. It just feels totally and completely “right“. I have never felt that about any other country where I have lived in the world – – in the US, especially, but also in Asia or in any other country in Europe, however much I might enjoy deeply aspects of the life and “flow” there, wherever it is.

And the feeling begins literally when the plane enters German airspace – – I literally feel it from there. Something notices something as deep as the bones inside! And as the landscape opens up below — the neatly tidy fields, farms and churches and houses clustered together across this patchwork landscape of verdant green, the thickets of forest still standing here and there, the order, the sense of well-planned things, the calm, the deep stability, even the special quality of mists here – – somethings so profoundly deep inside goes “click“.

(By crude contrast, I feel nothing of this when arriving in America. Nada. Never. Even as a small child, and well into my college years, I felt some palpable estrangement from the place. It was like an organ being rejected by the body. I have wanted to get out for as long as I lived there, and in fact have now lived outside the States for nearly 30 full years. I have zero desire to live there ever again, whatsoever, and do not even have a legal mailing address or base for “home“ in the States, for this reason. I have zero wish ever to live there again.)

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