More at home here than anywhere else

From pinterest - when I search "woodcut" forest

From Mary Oliver's "Upstream," page151.  In many places in the book of essays (which looks like it might have been drawn from a a variety of different books), in talking about Whitman and Emerson, Oliver talks about transcendence and states of ecstasy.  The second half of this quote gets to that.  And she's careful to represent it as not-too-much woo-woo.  The first half is equally careful in talking about what kind of "relief" being in nature is.  It's "being at home" and "a relief."  But it was not "escaping" (from "our own house" or unhappiness with people).  

Through these woods I have walked thousands of times. For many years I felt more at home here than anywhere else, including our own house. Stepping out into the world, into the grass, onto the path, was always a kind of relief. I was not escaping anything. I was returning to the arena of delight. I was stepping across some border. I don't mean just that the world changed on the other side of the border, but that I did too. Eventually I began to appreciate—I don't say this lightly-that the great black oaks knew me. I don't mean they knew me as myself and not another-that kind of individualism was not in the air—but that they recognized and responded to my presence, and to my mood. They began to offer, or I began to feel them offer, their serene greeting. It was like a quick change of temperature, a warm and comfortable flush, faint yet palpable, as I walked toward them and beneath their outflowing branches.

 Related: I have been watching screening interviews with 125 candidates at work.  One of them spoke about working with "newcomers" (new English speakers) and starting the year with making a bulletin board and asking students where "home" is for them.  Throughout the year, they add some story about home.