Home. It is funny how many different connotations that word can have for us. I went through a stage – maybe am still going through it occasionally – when I felt a strong longing to be home but realized the home I wanted didn’t exist. No red house on the end of the road. No pony in the backyard to greet me with a soft nicker. No fox like dog to curl up at my feet or lick my face. No paperboy on a bike. Even my later homes were gone. No farm house with my Dad sitting in the window waiting my arrival or waving a farewell. No Mom in her warm kitchen puttering endlessly with whatever the magic meal would be that day. Somehow even though I have become the one to sit near the window and wave or to putter in the kitchen my “real” home in one sense seems to always be the one(s) I shared with my parents. Grown up holidays have always been an extreme marathon of getting ready to make an event for everyone else – first Bob’s children when they were little, then our children, now grown children and grandchildren. My home is too small and I’m too much of a perfectionist to try to host both sides of the family (his and mine) at once so somehow mine drifted away after Mom and Dad died. Deepening the sense of loss. Last year in a fit of joyful madness I decided I would host not one but two Christmases at my home. One for my husband’s family. Another for as many of mine as I could gather. The discovery? That everyone in my family was feeling the same sense of loss and we were all longing to gather together. It was madness on my part but a real gift for the family.
Home Memory. This summer I went on a retreat at the Sinsinawa Mound enter near Dubuque. The retreat was filled with little 10 minute writing assignments. When our assignment was to write about where we lived, about home I wrote about living (I hoped) in my heart. However, when we were asked to write about "place" this is what I wrote:
It was just a swamp. A wetland with cat tails and reed grass and (most seasons) standing water. But to me it was a wonderful, magical place. It was bordered with slightly higher ground where big old
creek willow trees grew. These were made up of massive clumps of trunks. The centers of these clumps could easily morph into a fort or a castle or whatever imagination needed that day. The trunks of storm or age toppled willow trees became horses when sat astride, bridges when walked along,
protective walls when engaged in battles with “the enemy”, or picnic tables when it was
time for lunch.
“Food” was plentiful in this magic land. One could choose from cat tail “hot dogs”, butter & eggs (from the butter and egg plants), or any of a variety of fungi and mushrooms. The willow trunk table could be decorated with wild purple asters, delicate and airy Queen Anne’s lace, bright and sunny black-eyed Susans or whatever other flower was in season.
High adventure days called for trying to cross the wetter part of the swamp by stepping only on the little hillocks of grass or plant roots that rose above the water. A bad choice meant a wet muddy foot and an angry mother.
Less adventurous days called for massive water diversion projects. Hours could be spent building dams and digging trenches which filled back up with mud almost as quickly as you could dig them. (A lesson in nature’s power that many shore line restoration projects could learn from!)
Early spring meant the hunt for frog eggs. This was done by wandering along still thawing waterways looking for the tell tale black spots encased in gelatin like sacks. These, of course, had to be collected and kept in a bowl of smelly swamp water until the tadpoles emerged. (Mother never commented about this addition to her decor.)
It was just a swamp. It was a messy, smelly, buggy, old swamp. But to "little girl" me and to the
myriad of animals and insects that lived there it was home.
Another Home. For a while many of my dreams were located at "home" in Oconto even when they involved people who are current in my life. I had at least two that were located in my childhood home, filled with family and people who were important to me including you. I had one that very clearly depicted me returning "home" after making sure my girls were safely on their way to...? In that one I became briefly mired in some quicksand like mud but I knew in the dream that my own strength of will would get me out of and through it. I was going home a different way than the way I had come. The symbolism of that one is fairly obvious.
When I was a little girl playing in the swamp, I was fairly certain that I didn’t really belong here. My body was just a machine that I managed from somewhere deep inside my head behind my eyes – the control room I called it. I was just in this body to observe the world and learn about humans until the day my real family came from another world and took me home. I used to look out the living room window over the swamp and I was certain I could see light shining in the sky in the direction from which they would come. I even knew what year they would be here. I haven’t shared this childhood fantasy with very many people. Perhaps because I never really believed it was a fantasy. And now I am certain it is not. Somehow the me I was and am understood the spiritual beings that we are and knew that this is not our real home. These are not our real bodies. This is not all that we are. Today I think that the longing I can’t quite put to rest is for that reunion. The real homecoming. Not just the glimpses of it that come from deep peace, meditation, and those moments when you see a sunrise and you know that you are in it, gallop a horse along the road to the breakwater, or watch a raven fly and realize it is taking your soul with it. I can touch home at those moments and at times when I am alone. I long to be able to touch it all of the time.
So it is time, I think, to bring this long blog home, to closure, to some kind of farewell for now. I think in all these ramblings that what I see, what I may be trying to say is that we all have many, many different perceptions and understandings of home. When you experience the break-up of a marriage you are saying good-bye to one of your homes and it is very sad. But our real home, our true home, the one we all share and live in together (the only home, in fact, that really exists) is inside you as it is inside of me and inside of everyone you meet. While we must allow ourselves to grieve for what has changed we must also remember to rejoice in what is changeless.
Namaste
Suwayon
