Early this morning I left home and went to the coffee shop where I sat, drank tea and wrote. I left several hours later. It’s a late summer Vancouver day, sunny, breezy and noisy.

I came out of the coffee shop where they were playing pop, past another coffee shop where they tend to play jazz and blues, around the corner and up the road (somebody’s car was piping Eminem as it went by); I came here for lunch – where the staff is into Ugly Duckling and Ravi Shankar. Walking in Vancouver is like swimming in sound, or more accurately, sound which is really the smoking breath of human worlds slapping up against each other along the street.

Of course there is more than sound. There are the seaside-city smells, of concrete and cars, restaurants and seawater, but occasionally there is something less ubiquitous. As I rounded the corner on the way to lunch, there was the faint smell of wood smoke, and like it has always done, the smell evoked a wave of home sickness for some place I have never really been: a stranger breathing out the aura of a quiet world here in these deep currents of sound.

Of course it’s not quite true that world evoked by wood smoke is a stranger to me. I lived for many years where wood was my only heat and understand what it means to chop wood and carry water, and I miss the smell of smoke and the sense of safety and comfort it brings, even if I don’t miss my axe. And really, you can’t have one without the other: wood smoke requires chopping trees. Hence my sense of a home I have never had. That home comes with the comfort dislocated from the cost of achieving it.

I should be clear that I like the sounds of a Vancouver street. There is never a day where the only language I hear is English. That’s not something one can normally say of rural North America and the multilingual nature of this place is something that gives me another, different kind of comfort, one that tells me I am a part of the larger world. I also like all the various kinds of music one hears along the road, even if pop is often a little sentimental and some jazz can be a touch over-thought.

The thing about the sound-inundation, though, is that it makes it really hard to hear the relative whispers of the earth speaking: the sibilant clicks of tree leaves rubbing against each other, the critch of a branch moving, the slush of ocean waters beaching pebbles. All those sounds are here too, but you have to put some effort into finding a place absent enough of human worlds to hear them. Wood smoke evokes all those non-human sounds for me. They reach out from behind the aural curtain and catch me in the act of ignoring their claim on me.

Those non-human sounds have a kind of magical ability. They are an earthly invocation of my species origin, what people sometimes call “grounding” – a good descriptive word that, even it is getting populated by some pretty silly connotations. There are parts of me that cannot reach satiety with a steady diet of what we think of as human culture – music, books, art, etc. There are parts of me that need to float in the sea after dark, watching moon rise and listening to water slap and bird call – and not think at all. That feeling: that’s home. Something in my body knows this beyond all doubt.

Really what’s true is that I need both the human noise and this non-human home. I suspect we all do. It’s the beauty of being human: we can live simultaneous lives, exist in simultaneous realities, and I suppose that’s true because of how our senses work, and how our brain makes meaning out of all the environmental stimuli. But that’s something to talk about another time.