Poland is my home, my roots are here. There is nowhere I would

In the oath of belonging, a maestro speaks with the gravity of a bell: “Poland is my home, my roots are here. There is nowhere I would rather live.” Hear the simple words and feel the deep river running beneath them. A place is not merely a point on a map; it is a covenant of memory—soil that remembers our footsteps, air that keeps our first cries, streets that echo our names back to us in winter and in spring. When a creator of sound says home, he names the tuning fork by which all his music finds its pitch.

To say one’s roots are here is to confess a sacred dependence. Roots do not wander; they drink. They twist through clay and stone, finding water hidden from the hurried eye. So it is with a maker’s bond to his country: language, landscape, and liturgy seep into the work until the work begins to smell of birch and incense, to toll with village bells, to crackle like frost on a January field. The artist may travel widely, but the score is written in the hand of the place that raised him. Poland, with its plains and cathedrals, its funerals and uprisings, becomes not a backdrop but a bloodstream.

The ancients taught that love of homeland is both gift and yoke. It steadies the hand and burdens the conscience. Consider how a composer’s pages can bear the weather of a nation: dissonances that remember invasions, chorales that cradle prayers, silences that honor the unreturning. When he declares there is nowhere he would rather live, he is not choosing comfort; he is choosing witness. He elects to sit where the winters are honest, where cemeteries teach humility, where every season asks the artist to answer his people with work worthy of their endurance.

Look to a living parable from that soil. When Krzysztof Penderecki wrote his Threnody for the Victims of Hiroshima, the world heard Poland’s conscience sharpened into sound—screams shaped into strings, mourning disciplined into measure. Later, in his St. Luke Passion, the wounds of history were sung through ancient scripture, and an audience learned that suffering can be scored without being exploited. Beyond the manuscripts, he tended an arboretum in Lusławice, grafting rare trees into a garden—an act of faith that roots, once planted, will outlast noise and rumor. Music and trees: two grammars of the same vow.

Nor is this fidelity unique. Think of Chopin, exiled, who kept Poland in his mazurkas—the footwork of a village dance pressed into Parisian salons until listeners far from the Vistula felt the ache of fields they had never walked. Or of Solidarity, when shipyards became cathedrals of courage and hymns stitched workers to history. These stories remind us that homeland is not provincial when it is kept with humility; it becomes a lens through which the universal sharpens. To love one place truly is to learn how to love the world without abstraction.

The meaning of the proverb, then, is double. First, it is a declaration of gratitude: home as the well that does not run dry. Second, it is a charge: if your roots are here, tend the orchard; if you would rather live nowhere else, then make this place more livable—for strangers and neighbors, for the unborn and the soon-to-die. Patriotism without service is noise; service without love is toil. The right way is the braid.

Carry from this a clear lesson and rites for the road. (1) Name your home—not only the country, but the street, the river, the small bakery—and spend yourself there in some concrete act each season. (2) Let your craft carry your roots: write, build, teach, and plant in ways that sound like your place rather than a market’s echo. (3) Keep a “ledger of gratitude”—twelve entries for twelve months—so memory remains tender, not territorial. (4) Welcome pilgrims and refugees; a land worthy of love is a land wide enough for the lonely. Do these, and your life will harmonize with the maestro’s vow: Poland (or your own land) as home, roots deep, and no finer place to live than the one you make more luminous by staying.