Today I offer yet another selection from the art/writing project which I recently completed. As did the selections I've shared previously, it has to do with the subject of home. This one is "Home as Stillness and Rootedness."
Home as Stillness
One sunny Southern California afternoon, as I was walking home from elementary school, one of my classmates (whom I thought was a friend) approached me, looking a little leery, maybe mischievous—and definitely wary.
I soon learned why. Suddenly grabbing me behind my back and securing my arms, he called, “I got him!” Two other classmates immediately appeared. As I squirmed, one of them, Eddie, took a few fake swings at me, laughing, as did the others, Rick and Don. I had no idea what they were up to, but I felt scared, very scared, more scared than when, the previous year, as I passed by a house one block north of mine, a large dog ambling serenely through its front yard suddenly and without warning, ran and leaped toward me.
I struggled and struggled, but could not break free.
And I cried. I didn’t see any way out of this; I didn’t see how I could ever free myself of these classmates’ grips. It seemed helpless. What could I do?
Happily, another guy soon appeared, trundling up the sidewalk from the next street. It was Kelly (this being his last name, the only name anyone ever used for him). Kelly was several grades ahead of us and carried an air of unmistakable authority. “Kelly,” I mumbled through my tears, “help me.”
“Let him go, you guys.” And they did. Without saying anything else, I started running, started running faster than I had ever ran before. I flew. I flew to the next street, crossed it, then kept flying, kept racing down the block until I reached the alley that, when I ran left and through it, led to my street and my parents’ home, nine houses away. Nine beautiful houses away. I was desperate. I was desperate to get to the safety of my home.
Walking in the door, stepping into the soothing quiescence of the threshold, I immediately felt at ease. My heart calmed, my nerves relaxed. My breathing returned to normal. I plopped onto my bed and lay perfectly still. It felt good. It felt good to be home.
So good that I didn’t bother letting my mother know I was there. No need. She’d figure it out. Right now, I just wanted to be at home, to be safe in my home. I wanted to plant myself anew in its comforting soil, I wanted to find restoration in its soothing embrace.
When Mom walked in my room, I started crying all over again. Tears of relief. I was with my mother, I was in my place. I was where I had begun and where, from my young vantage point at that time, I thought I would end. Where else would I go for such comfort, such peace? Where else would I really go?
(Many years later, when I studied the Gospel of John in seminary, I read, in chapter six, how Jesus, having alienated many people with his metaphorical language about eating his flesh, asked his closest disciples whether they would abandon him, too.
(“To whom would we go, Lord?” Peter replied, “you have words of eternal life.”)
Indeed: where else would anyone go to find her ultimate stillness and deepest roots?
She’d go home. She’d go to the words of home.
When I was seventeen, preparing to graduate from high school and looking to the summer ahead, a summer in which, I was told, I would not need to work, I considered what I would do. It didn’t take long to decide. I’d hike the John Muir Trail, a 210 mile long trail that follows the peaks, valleys, meadows, and lakes of the Sierra Nevada range in California. I figured it would take me six, maybe eight weeks.
Had I ever backpacked before? Absolutely not. But I really wanted to do this. After some hesitation, Mom and Dad approved, helping me buy the equipment I needed and driving me to the trailhead. I began with a companion (at Mom and Dad’s insistence), but after a week he went home, and I was on my own for the next six or so weeks.
It was wonderful, so very wonderful. I reveled in everything I saw, everything I came to know and experience. All too soon, however, it was time to leave. It was time to go home.
Hiking over a pass and out of the range one stunning mountain morning, I spent the rest of the day trekking another fifteen miles down to the bank of a river, a lovely stretch of water rambling gracefully through the sheep and date farms set below the range. There I camped for the night. The ground, covered in dense grasses, was incredibly soft. It made for a delightfully relaxing sleep.
The next day, stepping onto Highway 395, the forgotten road that, sandwiched between the lush Sierra and the arid White Mountains (home to the Bristlecone Pine, one of the oldest trees on the planet), winds from the Mojave Desert to Lake Tahoe, almost half the length of California, I started hitchhiking, headed toward Los Angeles, looking forward to seeing my family. To be at home.
Just after sunset, just as the skies were darkening over the ocean and the lingering smog was painting the horizon a deep red, I reached my front door. My home. I didn’t have a key—did I really need one in the mountains?—so I rang the bell. Sister Kathleen answered the door. I smiled. “It’s Bill,” she called out.
Rushing to the door, my mother, my dear mother, she of deepest love and solace and childhood bliss, opened her arms wide, kissed me on the cheek, and took me into the house. “I know you,” she said. Indeed, she did. And I her. I was at home again, secure, protected, whole. “The prodigal son has returned,” Dad said, joking with my grandfather, who had come for dinner that night.
I knew better, however: I had never really left.
And why not? Here I flourished, here I grew. Here I found foundation, here I found place. Here I found the colors of my life, the pools of my desire. Here I could be me as I could not be anywhere else.
A sea anemone plants itself in the rocks of the tide, a gopher tunnels in the bowels of the earth. A tree springs from the dirt of the forest, a flower from the loam of the meadow. Like these animals, like these plants, only doing what they instinctually long for, consciously or otherwise, so had I dug myself into my home. So had I made it my center, the locus and linchpin of all I had known. Whether I was seeking safety, encouragement, or affirmation, I had looked to this home as the eye, the eye of the many hurricanes that swirled through my life and time. Here I began countless journeys, and here I would always come at journey’s end.
I knew I could never really leave.
Although I love many mountain places, I think I love the arctic the most. It is a place of pure magic. Absolutely. Its stark beauty, beauty born of miles of lonely lakes and deeply green tundra, of light shining from peaks whose jaggedness looks as if it been sculpted just yesterday, of endless vistas of yawning valley and glacier unseen, a beauty grounded in what is not there as much as what is, drives deep into my heart. Dazzling abundance, shimmering effervescence, spectacular desolation. It boggles my mind.
During winter, the arctic is silent, very silent. Aside from an arctic wolf or white fox slinking furtively across the snow, nothing breathes or moves. The birds and caribou have migrated south; the grizzlies are hibernating; even the musk ox shrinks its footprint. Deepest Kelvin temperatures grip the land. Aphonia reigns.
Come spring, however, everything changes. The tundra explodes with life. Millions of birds return from their winter hibernation, including the arctic tern who has spent the winter on the tip of South America; thousands of caribou journey from the boreal lowlands; and in a case of taking the good with the bad, billions of mosquitos appear, birthed and invigorated by the massive snowmelt oozing into the tundra.
Why do they come? These animals come because of home. Though they appreciate their winter climes, they come to life most in the summer arctic. This is where they mate, this is where they teach their offspring, this is where they put down their roots. They will never stop coming; they will never stop returning to this land.
How could they? Indeed, whywould they?
I know the feeling. Over forty years have passed since I hiked through the arctic, over forty years since I trekked alone in the forgotten eastern stretches of the Brooks Range. I reveled in everything I saw, rejoiced in all I experienced, the grizzlies, Dall sheep, and caribou, the treeless mountains, the icy streams. The eagles soaring to the edge of the sky. My days were incredibly long, my nights breathtakingly short: the northern sun was in full bloom. Like James Joyce’s young man of the Irish seas, I was alone and apart, breathing and tasting and touching the landscape. Alone at home.
One day I’ll go back. So will you. Can you ever fully let go of your nascent stillness? Can you ever really lose your roots of home?
It's been a big week for musician birthdays. Last week, we remembered Mozart and Schubert. Today, although his actual birthday was yesterday, February 3, we think about Felix Mendelssohn. Though born in Germany into a Jewish family, Mendelssohn was eventually baptized as a Christian. Sadly, like Mozart and Schubert, Mendelssohn died before he was forty. A musician of Romanticism--like Schubert--he wrote music that, when we listen to it today, sounds like poetry, its melodies lithely carrying us along, transporting us to new levels of emotional experience, pushing us into thoughts of the ethereal and divine. We walk away enraptured, enraptured with time, space, and destiny: life seems newly wonderful, wonderful beyond belief.
