Lenten roses preparing to bloom in deep shade of my side garden.
A little over a week ago I was admiring the lenten roses blooming in a friend's yard. Simultaneously I was filled with joy, and with sadness. The joy was at the intrepid beauties of this world and the idea that spring would indeed come, that despite cold and frost and possibly snow, these small blossoms would carry on and persevere. My sadness was more personal. I was sad because I was thinking about the lush field of hellebores that had surrounded my house and which have now been mostly lost. I was sad because I had given up more than I wanted to give up. I was sad because I had not expected how poignantly I would feel the loss of the old and familiar even as I accept and know that the new is good and indeed where I need to be. I was sad because I wanted to be home.
Home, and the subject of our own human longing and need for a sense of home, has come up in quite a few conversations over the past couple of weeks. It has been a steady track in the background of my own thoughts as well and I have come to a new understanding of home and what it means, at least for me. But first I probably need to deconstruct.
Home is one of those complicated terms with layers of meaning. Home can simply be where one lives. It can be the people one loves, the place where one spent one's childhood, the place that shaped the person we became. Home can be many things. It can be everything and it can be nothing. When we meet new people we often ask them where they are from. At least here, in the Southern United States, we are asking where they were born, where they grew up, who their people were. It is a question that sometimes comes up early in conversations here, but this is not true in all cultures or societies. Although the idea that where we are from is an important part of who we are is universal, it can also be a question that delves too deeply into the personal for casual exploration.
The idea of "home" is actually both simpler, and more complicated, than simple explication would allow. Home can be the place we make, the people we choose, but it is also shaped by the people we are. Tom Wolfe wrote a novel called "You Can't Go Home Again" and he was right. But we often misconstrue the message. It is not that you can't go back to your childhood town and pick up again. You can. But that place is not the same. You are not the same. None of us are the same people we were. We are not the same people we were last week, although we tend to think we don't change that much. The changes are so incremental we don't notice them until something happens that shocks us into awareness. Something like tearing apart your house. Or worse: divorce, death of a loved one, loss of one's career, home, way of life. Life is full of loss. Mostly we inure ourselves to the small losses, and yearn for a better place, a place without loss, a place we call home.
Two things, two contradictory things, struck me last week. They were not a part of this lingering conversation about home and yet they played into it. One of them was the "Violins of Hope" program performed in Knoxville last weekend. I attended, although reluctantly and mostly because I felt obligated out of family history and loyalty, but in the end I was glad I went. Musicians from the symphony performed on the old instruments. The readings were well done and the entire evening was poignantly beautiful. And yet I struggle with the entire mentality of "never forget". We are already forgetting. We forget that Jews were not the only victims of the holocaust, that twelve million were killed directly by the Nazis, including a far higher percentage of the Roma population (although a smaller number of actual individuals). We forget that between 38 and 55 million people died in WWII if we include military casualties. I am not saying this to negate the impact on the Jewish community, which was intentionally attacked, but it is only one story. We forget that genocide plagues human history. We forget that bad things do not happen in a vacuum, that bad things sometimes happen because good people turn their eyes away, yearning for the past, for better times, forgetting the past was never as we remember it. We forget and yet we do not. Is there a cost to not forgetting? yes. Is there a cost to forgetting. Also yes. Is there a cost to defining oneself by one's losses, not by one's gains?
The other thing that stuck in my head was a line from Haruki Murakami's novel Killing Commendatore. It is not the most beautiful or resonant passage I recorded from this novel, but it struck me in this moment of my life.
"You have the strength to wish for those things you cannot have."
This sentence captures in some essence much of what this book is about, as it is a novel about art, and love, and transformation, mostly about transformation and how art and love are about transformation as well. The ability to undergo transformation is a rare thing, and it almost always comes out of some deeply unsettled place, if not outright darkness, and yet, if we succeed it always results in something I will simply call beauty, even though that may not be obviously evident on the surface of things.
So, here is my question, or the line of my thoughts anyway. Not all of us yearn for home. Most of us are content with wanting whatever we can achieve. And yet the echo of that yearning still exists deep in our psyches and we are right to be afraid. To wish for the things you cannot have takes strength, and if you fail the costs can be great as the journey often involves dismantling so many of the things we believe about ourselves. But when does yearning for home become destructive? When is yearning for "those things you cannot have" lead to insight and transformation, and when does it become "never forget" and the road to defining oneself in the past, the road to death?
But back to the hellebores, and my own ever-changing understanding of home. There is a mythical place called home — the people I came from, the place I grew up — but I recognize that although those people and places shaped who I am, I also recognize that they are no longer home, if indeed they ever were. For a long time I made my home, not in a place but with a person. George was my home and I thought my house in Hyde Park was my "forever home". But that was an illusion. The house was only home because George was my home, and then I began to lose George and I found that I was homeless once again. Although I grew greatly through the love offered in that relationship, I also stopped growing. That is one of the funny things about relationships. We strive to be vulnerable and open ourselves up to each other, to grow together, but there is also the danger that we will stop growing and allow the relationship to be a substitute for inner growth. I sometimes wonder if this is more of a danger for women, who are often subtly taught to subvert their true natures, to become vulnerable in order to be cared for, or for people who have been damaged through early experiences, but I suspect it too is universal. I suspect it comes out of fear, fear of being alone, fear of not being good enough. Most of us never really find our true selves. Many of us never really even try.
Anyway George died, and once again I had no home. I had he house we bought in Knoxville, but I gradually came to see that our house was not my home. It was the place I bought so that George could be near his family, and I as well of course, but actually it was the place I bought so that George could die and I could start a new life. Eventually, that house held me too tightly to past and I had to let it go.
When I bought my current house I fell in love. Yes, you can fall in love with a place, although I realize now that I was also falling in love with the person I could be but was not yet. I felt instantly at home. For a long time I felt it was the place that was home, the physical house. I have no regrets. I am glad I bought that place, it was a refuge during a very bad year, a year when I learned another place I had thought was home, was not really home, just another external structure upon which I had built false home, to which I had given too much of my heart. I was looking for home in all the wrong places.
What I have discovered, although it has just now truly become coherent in my thoughts, is that I have found home, and it has been with me all along. I thought it was my house, and so it was, is and will be again. But that is not my true home. My house is home because it is the place I can be my true self. It was not the house that offered me security, but myself, even if initially I didn't realize the extent of how that worked.
What I realized most forcefully of late is that the search for home is a false search. Home is within each of us all along, it is our true selves, our best inner nature, and we carry it with us wherever we go. Other people, other places, cannot build home for us, but we can let those people and places in and welcome them into our homes. Or we can continue seeking. But if we keep on seeking, letting the external define us, if we keep looking for some kind of external validation or sense of home, we begin to define ourselves by the past, by our emptiness, not our fullness. And home becomes a place we can never reach. You can't go home again because home was never a place. You take it with you everywhere, the more you run from yourself, the more you look for an external place to fill the internal center, the more you obscure the path to that center and the further from home you ultimately find yourself.
At the moment, I am completely at home in my apartment. This was not initially the case because I moved here thinking that it would be holding station, never intending it to be "home". That changed when the scope of the job changed. And now I can say I am at home here. This is reflected in the fact that I am comfortable, and that I am cooking, sewing, planning out projects and, evenly more importantly, perfectly content to be doing nothing here, content to just be myself. And when I move back into my house it will be my home as well. Until it isn't. Until I change yet again. I hope that when the time comes, I will remember to not hold too tightly onto the past, to live in the present, ever-shifting as it may be, and to remember that home is with me always.