Again, I hope you had a good Christmas and are looking forward to the New Year.  As we go forth, I offer another piece from the art/writing exhibit in which I participated recently.  This is "Home as Memory."

Home as Memory

Chitipa, Malawi.  Ever been there?  It’s tiny.  Tucked into a sliver of Malawi’s northwestern corner, Chitipa is an oasis and veritable metropolis, a cacophonous hub of activity to which people come from many miles around.  Stroll down its main street and you will see markets, markets set up by farmers of other counties, coffin shops (for the too many tragic deaths from AIDS), a wireless station, even a beauty shop and hotel.  A “city” in a bush filled desert.

When I was in Chitipa, I stayed in its only hotel.  It had mosquito netting over its beds (in the event we had not been taking our malaria pills), sinks with running water, a dresser, and a mirror.  Its toilets, however, didn’t work.  We used them anyway, then flushed with pails of water that the staff brought in each morning and evening.  Breakfasts and dinners were uniformly delicious and presented gracefully, a curious mix of African and Western food.  Some goat, some chicken.  Some squash, some okra.  And always, nsima, a maize-based concoction, usually served as a chunk or block that one takes into her hands to eat.  High in carbohydrates and fiber and low in fat, nsima is the meal of choice for every Malawian.

I had come to Chitipa to teach. One of the churches in town was holding a pastor’s conference and I had been invited onto the team of Western teachers who had been asked to come and share their theological insights with local pastors.  I use the term “local” loosely, however, as most of the attendees came from many miles distant, walking or bicycling to get to the church for the conference.  As they could not afford the hotel, they slept outside, each night bundling up on the grounds of the church, snuggled under the canopy set up outside the building.  They always waited for us to arrive before they ate breakfast.

Most nights, feeling, amidst my relative luxury, somewhat isolated from what was really going on in the area, I slipped out of my hotel room to walk around.  I usually didn’t go into town, but rather into the countryside, where most people lived.  As I walked, I stopped frequently to gaze across the tumbled fields and twisted trees that dotted the red dirt land.  Everywhere I looked, I saw fires.  Every hut, every dirt shack, anything resembling a structure for living had a fire. These were the fires of Malawians, fires of home.

And the center of everything.  When one day I had been teaching, expecting to stop for lunch at 12:30 p.m., only to learn at 12:45 that meal completion was still a considerable way off and I would need to improvise, I felt this center acutely.  Not only were fires the center of every evening, they were the center of all cooking and dining as well.  Outside of the hotel, stoves did not exist.

We didn’t eat until 2:00 p.m.

(And to think, I noted as I flew back to the States, that when in my Western affluence I now go backpacking, I carry a tiny stove for cooking.  A fire for cooking?  No way. Such anomaly, such disparity. What I use for play the people of Chitipa would happily embrace for basic necessity.  It was a radically different measure of home.)

And these were big fires.  By the time I got out each evening, dinner appeared to be over, and now people were celebrating the day and, likely, the night before them.  Life was good.  Even if some stomach pangs remained, even if there was no cash in the bank, even if water was a half mile to the well in town (donated by a Western NGO), and even if stoves were missing, life was good.

So many of my memories have to do with fires.  From my childhood in suburban beachside Los Angeles, when my siblings and I roasted hot dogs and marshmallows over our fireplace; multiple evenings spent around campfires on family camping trips in the national parks of the West; to countless solo wilderness travels since, I have made memories around a fire.  Even today, at home northwest of Chicago, whenever I build a fire in our fireplace, stacking and igniting the kindling and watching the flames come to life, I remember the many days and lives I have built around a fire.  In particular, I think about journeys of weather, rain or snow, journeys of unexpected difficulty and challenge, times in which, when the skies collapsed in shades of thunder, I was so grateful for a fire, so thankful for its reassuring comfort, its delightful warmth, its ability to tie everything, hard or easy, together.  I could think about what I had done that day; I could think about what I would do come morning.  And I could remember.  I could remember the flow of my years, the probing compulsions and diversions of memory; I could remember the hope of reflection, the primal lure of mnemonic recall, the ever present urgings of beginning and end.  And I could keep going.

All in a fire.  The memory of fire.

There is a time, Ecclesiastes says, a time for everything.  A time for every experience, a moment for every event, a time for every delight. Love and hate, war and peace, losing and gaining, birth and death, and much more:  it all has its time.  And for those who are no longer with us, Ecclesiastes further observes, their memory, our remembrances of them, fade steadily, slowly slipping away from the forefront of our thought and imagination, always in our heart, but no longer incisive and present.  Their progenitors are gone.

Maybe so.  But I will always remember my fires.

2015 was a big year for memory. In the space of one August, I attended two reunions, one from high school, the other from college.  Whenever I attend a high school reunion, whenever I return to the beaches of Los Angeles, I think about home.  I can’t help it.  As my plane makes its final descent into L.A. International, I look across the vast Angelean basin, the spires of downtown and Century City; the cliffs of the Palos Verdes peninsula; the millions and millions of homes spreading across the land.  I see the verdant arc of the coastal mountains, rising majestically over the teeming metropolis, and I see, directly below me, the 405, its traffic humming frantically along, all day and all night madly racing between Los Angeles and San Diego. And I remember.  I remember that somewhere in this feverish mass of existence I have a home.  A home with a fire.  Though I can no longer be with this fire, can no longer be in this home, I feel both. I feel their memories, I feel their remembrances.  I see their pasts bubbling up, touching and moving me, wooing me with tendrils of deepest longing, longings of what is gone and graspings of what remains, the misty fires and fireplaces of yesteryear, speaking still.  And I see Ecclesiastes’s wisdom once more:  all homes, lost or found, have their time.

All homes have their fire.

When I see my best friends from high school, two guys named Gary and Jeff, I think about their homes.  I think about the many days and nights I hung out at their homes, I remember the many times they visited me at mine.  Most of all, I remember an afternoon at Jeff’s house, the house he shared with his brother and mother (his dad died at a quite young age), an afternoon that several of us spent listening to Crosby, Stills, Nash, and Young and, in our countercultural fantasies and predilections, smoking cannabis.  The chorus of one of the band’s songs will be forever with me, the way that CSN&Y’s harmonies captured writer Joni Mitchell’s description of the children of Woodstock as creatures stardust and golden, glistening and magical beings trying to return, as the progeny of a new God, to the garden.  Trying to return to home, trying to return from whence they believed they had begun.

Looking for that fire once more.

Yet when I arrived in Boise, Idaho, for my college reunion, a reunion organized by one of us who lives in Boise, I felt at home, too.  Greeting my most beloved of friends, seeing their deep and happy smiles, and hugging them with all the strength I could muster, I touched memory, touched it deeply, touched it as if I had never left its ethereal confines, had never left the home we had made:  we were together once more.  Like the afternoon at Jeff’s house, convoluted as it was, toying as it did with our collective imaginations, so were these moments.  They were moments of memory, profound memories and moments of home.

After a few days, we left Boise for a rented house in the Sawtooth Mountains.  Our first night there, I built a fire.  I had to.  I was home. We all were.  As the skies darkened and rain began to fall, we gathered together.  We read poetry, we read Terry Tempest Williams’s Refuge.  We talked of our work, we talked of our children.  We shared our journeys.  And we asked ourselves:  why are we here?

Few, if any of us, knew.  But we knew we were here, looking into a fire.

Come day two, some of us hiked five miles to a gorgeously sublime alpine lake, a picture of astonishing wonder and beauty.  We sat on the shore a long time, thinking and pondering.  Transfixed by the Apollonic imagery before us, we remembered.  We remembered why we are who we are.

I couldn’t wait to build another fire.

Like a quilt, an intricately woven quilt, home and memory envelop me, gathering and recollecting, recalling and inspiring, showing me that what I remember is no more than what I can fit into the adventure of, in a splash of irony, home.  Home shifts, home moves, home appears, and home vanishes.  But my memories do not.  Invisible and transcendent yet entirely present, they speak; they talk and they morph, transforming themselves continually. Always a newness, always a beginning. And always a home.

Let the center hold.  Let the memory remain.  Let the fire keep burning.  Oh Lord, take me back to the fires of Chitipa.