Grizzly Adams and a Longing for Home
Raise your hand if you remember (or have later become acquainted with) a beautiful T.V. show from 1977 and 1978 called "The Life and Times of Grizzly Adams," about a gentle-hearted man who was forced to flee to a life in the wilderness.
Better yet, raise your hand if the show's theme song (audio) (video), together with its wilderness shots, was (and/or still is) nearly enough to bring tears to your eyes:
Deep inside the forest there's a door into another land.
Here is our life and home.
We are staying here forever in the beauty of this place all alone.
We keep on hoping.
Maybe there's a world where we don't have to run.
Maybe there's a time we'll call our own,
living free in harmony and majesty.
Take me home. Take me home.
Today I ran into an unrelated photo of a remote Alaskan landscape, and something about it suddenly called my heart back to the tight longing my young heart felt when watching that "Grizzly Adams" theme so many years ago--and still feels today, perhaps even more so.
(Bonus: If you don't remember much or any of Grizzly Adams and want to know more, you can click here for video of the short T.V. intro which summarized the story.)
Even as a kid I knew there was something wonderful, yet unfulfilled in Grizzly Adams' wilderness life. To me, such an escape was a glimpse of paradise. And yet, the show was clear that wilderness life was hard, and even clearer came the melancholy truth from the themesong: Even in that place of peace and beauty, it was sadly "alone" and a place to "keep on hoping."
To us 1970's viewers, we were the ones looking to the wilderness as the place we didn't have to run, to live free in the harmony and magesty we thought was found in nature. The lyrics don't let us rest there, suggesting instead that Adams, who had that wonderful wilderness life, was still hoping for a place of harmony where he no longer had to run . . . for a home--and so are we. Thus the song leaves us with an unfulfilled, bittersweet longing that brings many of us to tears.
And they admitted that they were aliens and strangers on earth. People who say such things show that they are looking for a country of their own. . . . They were longing for a better countrya heavenly one.
Heberws 11:13-14.
C.S. Lewis' Until we Have Faces expresses that longing in this way:
"Do you think it meant nothing, all the longing? The longing for home? For indeed it feels now not like going, but like going back. All my life the god of the Mountain has been wooing me. Oh, look up once at least before the end and wish me joy."
(Kudos go to eattheolives for first bringing this quotation to our attention in her journal graphic.)
Ah, life on this planet is often hard, but dotted with beauty that gives us a glimpse and a bittersweet longing of something more and better yet to come.