Today, I present the final panel in the art show in which I participated last December. It is "Home as Survival."
Home as Survival
I’ve always wanted to go to Mongolia. I’ve always wanted to step into the Gobi desert and wander. To wander across the steppe, the open space, the wideness of the rambling landscape. I would travel for days and days and days. From monastery to monastery, I would journey, stopping at each one, be it an hour, a day, or many nights on end, and listen. I would listen to the walls, the chants, the prayers. I would listen to the monks, silent or not, I would listen to the stillness of the desert. I would think about the paintings of Georgia O’Keefe. Particularly her “Clouds.”
And when I was not staying in a monastery, I would, if I could, stay in a yurt. I’d enjoy its warmth and camaraderie, its ambience, its words, its talk and speech. I’d rest in its safety and protection. Separated from the desert, the baffling and fearsome desert, by sturdy canvas walls, I’d bask in the yurt’s homeness, its ability to shelter and sustain me. And I would know that despite the weather, the storms of dust and lightning and thunder that might be raging outside, I’d be OK. I’d survive.
Survival is a precarious thing. It’s so basic, so elemental. And it’s not guaranteed. We must work, often very hard, for it. Yet we know, know almost instinctively, that we want it. It’s not difficult to see why Scientology founder L. Ron Hubbard insisted that the goal of life is to survive. And in some curious way, every other living thing knows this, too, knows it intimately. Every living thing wants to survive.
Somehow, when we’re in a home, we feel as if we can survive better than we can anywhere else. Whether our home is solidly built, a nondescript dwelling of brick and tract home; a mansion made for a life of calm, pride, and predictability; or a home lonely and contingent, perched precariously on stilts, cliff or, more challenging still, an eroding seashore, drifting away with the incoming tide, we look to it as our center, our source: our survival. It might be pocked with gunfire, a victim of ethnic conflict and political strife. Or it might have been pummeled by the rain, its once proud metal and wood security now quivering in fright. But as long as it stands, it is our home. It’s our survival.
It is our place.
Or maybe like the proverbial Bedouin or wandering Jew, we might not have a place we can call home, might not have a place to which we can always go. No matter. We still look to survive. After all, what else is there? Fixed point of surcease and rest or not, each day we face our darkness and reach for our light. And we decide: how do we live? How do we survive? How do we construct a place, a point, slippery and tenuous as it might be, we can call home?
Yet even if we do, I occasionally wonder: will we always survive in home? As I write, multiple construction crews are building a home in the hills above Los Angeles that, when finished, will go on the market for five hundred million dollars. Will we survive any better there?
Unlikely. For whether I wander in a driving rainstorm, inundated with torrents of water and hail, or whether I sit in my living room, start a fire, taste its warmth, and make hot tea, I’m still at home. I’m still surviving. I do not need a five hundred million dollar home to survive. I do not even need a ten thousand dollar home to survive. I only need to know home.
To celebrate a special occasion, I once ordered a very expensive bottle of red wine. A merlot from the vineyards of northern California. Would I have survived with a less expensive bottle? Of course. But I wouldn’t have been in the precise idea, as I saw it in that moment, of home. For me at that point, life and survival were not about saving myself physically, but saving the point of existence, of celebrating being alive, to celebrate being able touch the happiness in being me and me with my wife. Home was survival as meaning.
There has to be meaning. In Brave New World, we see a community that has lost its meaning, a community that has been deprived of its sense of home. A community for which survival is nonsensical. “What is a home?” its people ask. “And what is a mother or father?”
These folks are not living; they’re not even surviving. They have no real home.
Decades ago, I took a solo snowshoeing trip in my beloved Sierra Nevada mountain range of California. Much snow had fallen in the mountains that year, and I was eager to hit the trail. The afternoon I arrived, the sky was clear, the sun was strong. I cooked dinner to a gorgeous display of alpenglow on the eastern peaks, my stove humming away in the snow, my body on my air mattress, my tent beside me. A crow croaked, a chickadee chirped. The trees said nothing.
I left early the next morning. Almost immediately, snow started falling. And never stopped. All through the day, it tumbled before me, dazzling, enticing, wrapping me up in its lilting secrets. Come nightfall, however, its secrets stopped being so marvelous. Midway through the long march to dawn, I awoke to find that the snow had buried my tent. I had to drag myself out of my sleeping bag, get dressed, and crawl outside to push the snow off the sagging fabric. Twice.
Come morning, snow was still falling. But I trucked on, checking maps, ascertaining my compass position, feeling confident in where I was going. So it went for several days. One afternoon, however, I looked up to realize that, unfortunately, I was no longer sure where I was. The steady drone of snow and sinking clouds had thoroughly obscured my view. Maps were of little help, and the compass only as good as I could position myself on the map.
What to do? After a night of rest, ensconced in a snow cave, cooking my dinner over my trusty stove, watching its tiny light of flame bounce off the ceiling and, come bedtime, enjoying a warmth I could not achieve in a tent, I woke up and reconnoitered. Glory be: I figured out that I was actually not far from my exit point. And I could finally see some landmarks. Life felt much better.
As I began the trek back to the trailhead, I thought a lot about home. I thought about Mom and Dad, sitting in their house in the ocean air of California, reading in their plush chairs, listening to classical music and eating cheese and crackers before bed. Home. Gosh, I thought, how I want to experience this home. How I want to survive in this home. How I long to step into this home once more, to leave the elemental challenges of alpine frigidity and brumal entanglement, to enter a place where survival can be had at the push of a button. Sure, it was decadent, and sure, it undermined the adventure, but on this day, this day of making up lost time, this day of negotiating an arduous and difficult route, this day of looking for often elusive direction in a snowy wilderness, I wanted to survive in a home where survival would not end. I wanted to survive more than I did not. What greater thing, I thought that night as I stretched out in another snow cave, my candle burning, my food before me, the sun setting and the wilderness plunging into a starry darkness, than to survive at home?
About ten years ago, my son and I were backpacking through the wilds of Banff National Park in the Canadian Rockies. We had been hiking for about four days when one morning, to our surprise, we realized we could no longer see a trail. We suddenly felt frightfully alone, painfully alone in an unspeakably vast wilderness.
We looked around. To the west we could hear a stream, to the north, our intended route, two rows of peaks moving towards one another as they curved toward the divide. Wow, I thought, I really wanted for us to reach the lake basin that, the map told me, is in the shadow of the divide by the end of the day. It was to be our home for the next two nights.
Happily, we soon found the trail and made it to our preferred camp. Dinner proved particularly delicious that night, too. Several years later, however, my son was hiking alone through a rather empty stretch of the Sierra when one night, long after he had gone to bed, a singularly intense deluge of wind and rain descended. It poured and poured and poured. Payson’s tent nearly washed away. His sleeping bag was almost unusable.
“But I was where I wanted to be,” he told me later. “I didn’t need to be rescued. I was OK.” As I think about this today, I realize how profound his observation really was. Payson grasped that, however and wherever he survived, he was at home.
As the late Steve McQueen once said, “I’d rather wake up in the middle of nowhere than any city on earth.”
Home will always be home.
As I listened to Messiah's "Hallelujah Chorus" recently, I reflected, again, on its power, spiritual as well as political. As the story goes, when then British king George II heard its opening strains, he stood up. In an era when people sought to emulate, out of respect, what their king did, the rest of the audience stood up, too.
