When hunger strikes...

Having spent the first half of my life in the rolling hills of the East and Midwest, I find the mountain landscapes of Eastern Washington utterly fascinating. 

That's a curious human thing, isn't it; to be fascinated by the unfamiliar.  And yet we humans are also notorious for being drawn back to the familiar: I remember one of the reasons I decided to work for the bishop here was because he had a Virginia accent, and sounded like home.

So which is it?  Are we drawn to the familiar, or to the unfamiliar?  I think they're different kinds of hunger -- and, like most hungers, they tend to arise when something's a little out of balance.  But they're also different kinds of hunger, I suspect.  For me, at least, the hunger for something different is more of a surface hunger, a hunger of the eyes.  The hunger for the familiar?  That, I think, is a hunger of the heart...