The thing about coming back to the Bay Area, it's like coming

In the spare testament of Richard Serra—“The thing about coming back to the Bay Area, it’s like coming home for me”—we hear the old vow of nostos, the home-return that completes a journey’s meaning. To come back is not merely to reverse distance; it is to be re-stitched to the fabric that first gave you shape. The phrase for me is humble and exact: he names not a universal law, but the intimate geography of a maker’s heart. In those few words ring foghorn and tide, ship-steel and hillside light, the way place can apprentice the soul to its own weight and music.

The ancients knew that a craft has two masters: the teacher who speaks, and the land that does not, yet instructs without cease. The Bay Area—with its wind-etched bridges, shipyards, and cliffs—tutors the eye in curvature and span, tutors the body in balance against weather and scale. When Serra says coming home, he confesses that his lines and planes learned their grammar from that coastline. The harbor and the yard, the gantry and the rust: all these are alphabets that entered his hand long before he bent steel into eloquence. To return is to listen again to the first language.

There is an origin-story, half memory, half metal: a boy watches a ship slide from cradle to water, the earth trembling. He feels mass become motion, object become event. That tremor is a curriculum. Years later, the man works among mills and yards, learns the heat and danger of plates, the obedience and refusal of matter. Out of this discipline rises a sculptor for whom weight has voice and space has tension. When he comes back to the Bay Area, he stands where that voice first spoke. This is not nostalgia; it is fidelity—honoring the well from which one drinks.

Consider a parallel from history. The poet Czesław Miłosz, after exile and wandering, kept returning on the page to the landscapes of his youth—the bend of a river, the birch’s skin, the taste of rye bread. Those details steadied his vast meditations; homeland gave his metaphysics legs. So with Serra: the Bay Area becomes not postcard but plumb line. It keeps grand ambition tied to ground. The work seeks the monumental, but the soil of home prevents spectacle from becoming hollow. Form remembers where its conscience was forged.

A humbler story: a welder named Arturo left a port city to chase wages inland. Years passed; his craft sharpened, but his sense thinned—why build, for whom, to what end? On a visit back home, he walked the docks at dusk. The cranes looked like saints in hard hats. The air smelled of salt, diesel, and oranges from a lunch pail. An old foreman clapped his shoulder and said, “Still straight with your seams?” Something re-aligned. Arturo returned to his shop and began a side project: benches for the seawall, paying attention to how wind scours and how backs lean. The benches held stories as well as bodies. “It felt,” he told his daughter, “like coming home.” Place had returned purpose to practice.

Hear the teaching beneath Serra’s sentence: creation is a dialogue between the wandering and the rooted. We must travel to widen the vessel; we must come back to fill it with water that sustains. The Bay Area here is every maker’s natal climate—your first street, your grandmother’s proverb, the color of your earliest fear. To come home is to restore proportion: to remember that technique without belonging becomes an acrobat; belonging without technique becomes a lullaby. Joined, they are hymn and architecture.

Let this be your rule of craft and life. (1) Name your coordinates: write five details of your home—materials, sounds, verbs—you want your work to carry. (2) Keep a “roots day” each month: return in body if you can; if not, return in practice—cook the old recipe, walk the old mile, read the old voice. (3) Build with honest mass: choose one constraint (material, budget, time) that anchors you the way steel and gravity anchor form. (4) Seek the tremor: visit places that first shook you awake, and listen for what they ask of you now. Do this, and you will find what Serra names: that coming back is not retreat but replenishment, and that to say “It’s like coming home for me” is to confess the secret arithmetic of greatness—origin multiplied by attention, returning multiplied by courage, until the work stands in its own weather and does not fall.