One of the best reasons for having my smart phone nearby is the growing number of apps which assist me is exploring and understanding the natural world. There’s Sky Safari, which enables me to point my phone at any twinkling light in the night sky and learn all about it, whether it be a star, a planet, gas cloud, or distant galaxy. There are apps like Garden Answers which use facial recognition technology to identify plants. Sun and Moon gives me daily info about sunrise, sunset, waxing and waning cycles and high and low tides. But for some time now my absolute favorite has been Merlin Bird ID, produced by the Cornell Bird Lab. Merlin helps you find and identify birds. It’s brilliant. And one of its coolest features is sound ID.So I bring my phone out onto the deck, like I did this morning, set Merlin to Sound ID mode, and it begins listening to all the birdsong right along with me. Then the fun begins as Merlin individually identifies what birds are singing which songs and lists them for me on the screen in real time. Thanks to Merlin I am slowly learning to recognize subtle differences between the various birds that visit my yard. Even better is understanding just how many of them there really are. This morning, no less than 24 species of wild birds. Most of which Tina and I have visually confirmed, but there are a few that we definitely hear but haven’t been able to spot yet.Anyway, I have yet to become anything close to what you would call a birder (though I could easily see that happening, so stay tuned) but what utterly astounds me about learning to listen to these creatures is that they are in my yard! My yard! And this is nothing new. They’ve been here my whole life. This universe of life. This symphony of sound. Always here. And until recently, mostly unnoticed, mostly unknown, and mostly under appreciated.If you know Tina and I you know we’re great lovers of nature, and of the outdoors, and of traveling and adventuring into the wild whenever possible. But despite all those travels, nothing astounds me quite as much as the discoveries we make about what’s going on right under our noses in our own back yard. And I think that is the point of today’s thought. It seems to me that this journey of living—if we do it right—turns out to be a great big circle. Life takes you away from home, out into the world with all its wonders, and hopefully out there you learn to see and hear and feel, and then somewhere along the way you begin to suspect that you’ve left a great big wondrous world back at home.The great T.S. Elliot put it better than I ever could:“We shall not cease from exploration, and the end of all our exploring will be to arrive where we started and know the place for the first time.”Live long enough and you will live to know how the earth begins to pull your body back to itself just as it begins to set your heart free. Live long enough and you will live to know your children as adults and your parents as children. Live long enough and you will live to know the universe of wonders beyond your front door, and the universe of wonders that were always right there, hiding in plain sight in your own backyard.Ashes to ashes. Dust to dust. Life is a great big circle. It’s aim is to lead us out and bring us home. And it doesn’t matter whether you’ve traveled the wide world or never left town. Life is everywhere. Don’t miss it. 24 species of wild birds in my own backyard. Always been there, waiting to see if I’d ever notice. The goal of your life, my friend, is you becoming you. Never stop exploring, but know that what your looking for is home. How will you know you’ve built yourself a beautiful life? I think it’s to arrive where you started and know it, and you, for the first time.