Dangers Just out of View
Do not pursue the missing sock,
The partner to your single shoe;
Though losing either one may rock
Your sense of balance, don’t pursue,
Unduly, missing treasures: wide
Their unwed wanderings may flee,
And you might quite unsettled be
To see on capture what’s inside.
Remember as you, hunting, run,
That warmth and dark like boot or sock
Is favored as a sun-baked rock
By spider, snake or scorpion.
Now that super storm Sandy is mostly past, those in the wake of the destruction are left to dig out from under all of the mayhem. As all natural disasters do, Sandy left behind not only massive damage brought on by the high winds, flooding, snow, fire and explosions that were part of the storm and its immediate effects but a whole swath of financial, social, political, logistical and definitely not least of all, emotional and personal damages that will take years to be mitigated, let alone resolved. Besides the losses of life and health that are such obvious costs of a massive storm ripping through, we all know–those who have been through this grinder before, anywhere in the world most especially–that there are innumerable other things once held dear that have been slashed away in a few hours’ time and many of them will never be recovered.
The homes blown down, stripped away by violent waters, or burned were filled with people and lives and the Stuff of those lives–in many cases, all gone. The businesses closed for a few days, often in crucial periods of their peak season, are eclipsed by those whose doors, if they still physically exist, will close forever and by the many owners and employees and customers who will have to find other resources for making a living or acquiring the services and goods they count on to shape their ordinary lives. They will all find, as my spouse said very quietly to me when I came down the stairs to find him waiting palely on the 11th of September in 2001, that ‘the world as we know it has changed.’
But we also know from long experience that disasters, whether natural or human-made, can bring unexpected goodness trailing in their wake. The immediate selflessness and generosity and heroism shown by those who rush into the maelstrom to save others and who pull the stricken into their waiting arms of safety and warmth and shelter and healing are, when we others take a lesson from their shining examples, only the first wave of light and hope to follow the darkness and despair. If we all, whether by the nebulous but potent means of offering support in our hearts, minds, prayers, and invention or by the more concrete ways of donating, digging, driving; of building stronger buildings to replace those lost, remembering those who have died with forward-looking perpetuation of their virtues, and taking up whatever tools we have to recreate a more closely knit community that can expand exponentially to bring in every person with every need and every gift that can fill that need–then every storm is not an irremediable horror and every battle is not the one that will end safety and sanity forever. We are bigger than the storms. We can be the rainmakers who rise up out of ordinariness and even destruction to build something real and new and extraordinary.
Comfort and security, that’s what I want. And I think I’m hardly unusual in that urge. Aside from the rare adrenaline junkies whose craving for danger and life on the edge knows no bounds, most of us like to have at least one place in life, on earth or in mind where we can crawl in, curl up and feel like nothing and no one can assail us there.
While I adore travel and I treasure those people and experiences and grand-and-glorious places that it has brought to my acquaintance, there’s at least a small part of me that may always be leaning toward Home. I don’t think of myself as an adventurer by any means at all, but I’ve grown a bit more attracted to the happy mysteries of the unfamiliar or even the exotic as I’ve gotten older, and I can appreciate much better how much wealth and delight the new and unexpected can often bring into my purview. Now, what I must keep in mind instead of a constant combat against my natural urge to shun all movement outward from my safe, soft center is that my concept of that person-place-or-thing identifiable as Home has changed, and can change, and certainly will change, because that’s exactly the sort of surprising flexibility that an even minimally worldly human can experience, once the crying need for total security is breached satisfactorily.
So here goes: once more I shall leap outward in hope and expectant happiness, and all at the same time remain busily, constantly honing the cozy little hideaway that will shelter my spirit and, if need be, my self when the adventures get a little overwhelming. With a cheery wave, when I’m not too tightly coiled up with my security blanket there, I shall ever bid you all a fond goodbye, farewell, and goodnight–and see you in the morning.
A Particular Kind of Homesickness
The road we ride is an old back road, a highway that goes nowhere fast,
and as we drive and drift and dream, we see the present meet the past,
the way that it has always done from cities to the countryside,
the way we know that history recycles us, and far and wide,
we all return to what we’ve known and circle back to home and hearth
whether together or alone, to best-loved places on the earth.
Is it just crazy, that we long to find ourselves in Mama’s arms,
in childhood’s safety, in our fondest corner of our homes, our farms,
our gardens, houses, classrooms, fields? Is this insanity, or just
finding our life and hope and heart in best-loved places, as we must?
Return to rooted, distant loves, become simplicity and grace,
and find the fields of gold we seek in each his own familiar place.
I’ve been thinking about childhood. The freshness and innocence, the naiveté and helplessness, the curiosity and amazement at every new thing–and everything is new–and of the naturally self-centered universe one forms because self is all one knows. I’ve been thinking about how all of these qualities, so clear and natural in childhood, repeat throughout our lives in cycles. Varied by age and circumstance, and certainly by our own personalities as they develop, but there and recurrent all the same.
I’ve been thinking about how little we are all aware of these cycles and patterns in ourselves over time. We humans, though we congratulate ourselves as Homo sapiens, intelligent beings, are poignantly–sometimes poisonously–unwilling and even unable to truly see ourselves all that clearly. It’s not terribly hard to be self-aware, to know the good and bad of one’s personality and character and style, but it’s amazingly uncommon that we choose to acknowledge it, let alone are able and willing to do anything useful to control or change what we can or should. Most of us are rather childlike, if not infantile, in that respect. We want forever to be loved and be the center of the universe in that way we sensed we were as small children, before knocking up against whatever form of reality dented that illusion for the first time.
For the very fortunate (like me) it’s easy to look with a critical eye on those who are in the midst of childlike neediness because of their poverty, ill-health, lack of education or resources, old age or difference from the popular norms. Easy to forget that I don’t have the same obvious petulance or beggarly qualities only because I am so fortunate, so well off and well fed and loved and young and-and-and. I am the lucky center of my universe for now. It’s simple to be placid when I’m so rich.
I can only hope that this good life not only continues to keep me content, but that it affords me the leisure and good grace to look a little less harshly on the struggles of others. To be more patient and understanding when someone else is in that childlike state of need, whether for the starkest, plainest of dignities–sheer life not being at imminent risk–or for food and shelter, for health and wholeness, for peace and hope. If I can’t be an agent of change, bringing those gifts to those who need them, at least I must try to remember what it is to be in that fragile state and know how much I depend upon the rest of the world myself for being, by contrast, not in my childhood of utter need.
Red sky at morning: Sailors [Shepherds], take warning!
Funny, isn’t it, how we become so attached to our superstitions and assumptions about our daily experiences and expectations. If we put too much stock in signs and portents, isn’t there just a little bit of a chance that we might do the safe and predictable and wrong thing and end up so very much smaller and less interesting than we might have become had we taken a chance? Seems like it might be ever so much smarter to take a chance at growth and improvement and looking for enlightenment, don’t you think?
Lightening Upward
Nothing do I covet,
nothing lack and
nothing seek–
except the serendipity of Light
that cuts the darkness open,
transforms blackness
to less bleak,
and with its glinting stars sweetens the night,
that makes my thoughts reach higher,
afire indeed
to reach the peak,
enlightened now, and gladly there alight.
Imagine! There could be some lovely opportunities and surprises in store for us all if we open our eyes and look for whatever light can leak through into our ordinary, dim and easily influenced expectations. At the very least, why not choose the challenging and positive and exciting interpretation when those old signs and portents show up again?
Red sky at night: Sailor’s [Shepherd’s] delight!
Many years have passed since I first had reason to recognize that Home was not a built structure or even a location but a state of mind, a condition of the heart. It becomes associated with places by virtue of the happiness that embraces us there and also to the degree of intensity with which we are cared for and loved by the people of that place. The beauty of this characteristic is that Home can become portable when we are able to revisit those people or that contentment and security, belonging and joy, wherever they go, even in memory at times.
The complication therein is that the more places become Home, the more ways I can feel Homesick.
I will never complain of this any more than I would of any other pleasure or privilege, even when they fill me to the point of bursting–can anyone ever truly be surfeited with happiness? But there are times, perhaps those happy times most of all, when my reverie strays down all the pretty paths that lead to those many beloved locales and times where and when I’ve felt most accepted, at ease, at peace. My heart follows, soaring over all the lands and seas and resting where it will: in the arms of loving and hospitable friends and towns and favored hideaways and palaces I’m privileged to know as Home. It’s not that I can’t be contented where I am, it’s that the well of contentment runs so deep that every aquifer offshoot of it eventually leads my thought and memory back to other greatly loved locales. 
It can happen at the edge of the crashing January ocean, beside a crackling fire, on an island-hopping ferry-boat, in the midst of sweeping farmland fields, or in the center of some sizzling, jazzy, noisy city. When I feel it, my breathing speeds up just a little and my heart’s singular syncopation becomes more pronounced and I might feel just the slightest sting of salt cutting at the corners of my eyes. Suddenly there is that tingling, that sub-sonic hum, that says I am at Home–and this is how I can invoke a rooted joy that echoes back to me with whispers of welcome in so many marvelous parts of the world.
I have been genuinely at home in the immensity of an ancient forest and on the flanks of a gleaming mountain; under the Gothic vaults of a cathedral, the low roof of a cozy suburban home, or under the spangled starry night-bold sky; among humble strangers whose language is worlds away from mine and in the arms of my dearest, closest and longest-known loved ones. Home, whatever and wherever it may be, is precious beyond words and missed in every atom of its forms at any moment when it is not near or I’m not in it.
What I could not imagine, all those years ago, was that I would find myself at home as well in a construct as much as in a constructed place. Yet here I am, posting letters daily to a family of people I may never even meet, and feeling as though I am in a kindly, hospitable place of heart and mind that tells me once again that I am Home. May you, too, who are reading this, always find–or make–yourself good homes in all the places that you can, whether in a graciously appointed house or in a soul-filling hermitage of your choosing; whether surrounded by the comforting presence of people who fill your days with delight or in the quiet retreat of your own contemplative corner–or right here, where you are always welcome to come and sit for a little while and chat and go by the name of Friend.
My two cents: some days are a bit of a tails-you-lose proposition, if only in the sense of lost time you’ll never get back . . .
I have two words for you: undesirable expenses. I’ll say right up front here that I am in no way comparing my day yesterday with those disasters of epic proportions in life, safety, health and happiness that are visited regularly on people around the world and even those in my own circle of love and acquaintance. So you already know, then, that I am still here to tell the tale and it’s only generalized annoyance and frustration at my own petty, less-than-optimal Happenings that make me even say it wasn’t the most glamorous and desirable way to while away the hours of that “extra day” we get every four years in the form of February 29, or Leap Day.
There are some people who claim that what happens on the 29th day of February is a sort of cosmic Freebie–it doesn’t count as real in the grand scheme of things, doesn’t actually exist, because after all the 29th of February doesn’t even appear calendars for three-quarters of the years of our lives. Of course, this idea of the day’s magical insubstantiality might be considered problematic by any of the people who on February the 29th are born, get married, win the lottery, or anything else they might consider a big Plus, if not essential. Maybe I should’ve planned my 29th better ahead this time around, just in case there was anything to the theory. But disregarding any potential Bonus inherent in the date, I did as I always do and scheduled/happened upon just another ordinary day of Being Me. Not that I find this practice in any way lacking panache and glamor, as I am after all quite the fantastic creature ‘as is’.
The only straying from my typical day was decided for me: a return visit to the local radiology center where I’d recently had my regularly scheduled mammogram. This was simply the first available date for my ‘reshoot’, and I took it. Arranging times for routine medical checkups is hardly routine, a sketchy business at the best of times, so when a scheduler says the magic words “I have an opening . . . ” I leap. Leap Day it is, then. I even showed up a little early, because who knows . . . . Should I have been worried that the first magazine I saw on the waiting room reading table in the Women’s Health Clinic was ‘Rifleman‘? No matter, I plunged ahead.
Thus I found myself sitting in the hallway between the time of being Ready for My Closeup and getting my radiological reading from the oracle-doctor, and thinking dimly about whether my worrier-self needed to be consulted. I slouched there looking at a wall that was quite blank except for the electrical outlet that was either winking at me conspiratorially or making grimaces of warning–I couldn’t tell which. This, at length, confirmed for me that I am either too jaded or too lazy to get worried about such things.
Having what is blandly termed “dense tissue”, I have probably had call-backs on at least 50% of my mammograms over the years. Auditioning actors might like callbacks, but I’m not such an enthusiast. Mostly, it means another half day of my precious life’s hours down the drain. So far the worst that has come from any of those callbacks were a few visits to a surgeon who aspirated collected fluid from persistent cysts, which while it’s another time-eater and not my first choice for a purely entertaining thing to do, is benign stuff. And I will certainly admit that I am glad someone cares enough about either me or my money to check up on my health from time to time. Even if I could figure out a handy way to do my own digital mammography ‘x-rays’ with a DIY home kit (my version would likely involve a non-stick frying pan, a bench vise, six disposable cameras, silly putty, and duct tape), I know from looking at the resultant tissue images yesterday that there’s not the remotest hope I could usefully decipher what looks to me like a grey interstellar cloud with a sparse constellation of teeny white fibroid stars in it. So I sat there in that hallway gazing without much thought at an electric receptacle.
It was, of course, a relief all the same that I had a perfectly happy diagnosis confirmation and no need to do further imaging or biopsies or aspirations. If I am to have aspirations I’d much prefer them to be for more impressive, productive or fun things than personal deflation. By the time I ran a couple of errands on the way home, there was a hefty chunk of the morning all siphoned right away and with very little to show for it but my one-page declaration of Negative (or Good) Results.
Sometimes, when things are obviously entirely beyond my control I begin to feel like a seahorse out of water . . .
No matter, I had better things ahead. And indeed, the afternoon was a pleasant one, beginning with that telephone call from Mom S that led to yesterday’s reverie posted about the ambient music of the world, going on through the latter part of the chamber orchestra rehearsal I caught when I went to pick up my partner from his work with the players, and next leading to getting a few needful things done at home before we drove south for the evening’s church choir rehearsal. Indeed, I had put away my sense of tedium from the morning’s sitting-around and getting-pinched and sitting-around-again extravaganza and I was able to enjoy the evening’s rehearsal from my perch in the adjacent office while looking forward to a commute back home afterward, an hour or so to unwind, and then off to sleep away a longish day.
This was where things went a little off course. Literally. We were hardly on the freeway, heading wearily but contentedly home, when we caught the usual sight of many red taillights coming on as we approached the freeway construction zone downtown and prepared to get into a brief bottleneck. As we were both scanning ahead to see if the traffic seemed more backed up than usual, the cars all close together but not yet terribly slow, right in front of us appeared a very big piece of Something that could not possibly be avoided at freeway speed, let alone when it spanned the entire lane, was obviously made of metal, and was framed by cars whizzing right alongside us. No swerving, no amount of standing on brakes, and no wishful thinking could fix the situation, so drive right on over it we did. With a crunch and a clank. Whether it was a truck tailgate or a piece of construction scaffolding or something else was irrelevant: it was big, pointy, solid and Right There. Amazingly, the car jolted but never went off its straight line. The Tire Pressure light came on at the dashboard instantly, though, and we knew continuing forward was not optional.
Whether getting fluid removed from oneself, being pressed to near-nothingness in a mammography machine, or seeing *all* of the air go out of a tire, one is always a little surprised at the Shrinking Feeling involved . . .
My fabulous chauffeur got us up the first exit ramp and our champion car hobbled up the street far enough that we could get off this busy city avenue and into a passenger drop-off zone outside a parking garage. All of the good things that could happen from there on in did happen, so I have to give credit to the kindness of the day that, first of all, we didn’t see the debris until it was virtually under us, so there was no time to tighten up and get any injuries from the jolt. That the car behind us that was also ‘hit’ also limped up the exit safely, passengers intact. A large group of men passing by as we got out to survey the damage stopped and offered to help us change our tire: not, it turned out on inspection, necessary or useful, because both right-side tires were deflated far more than I ever was after fluid aspirations. I’d never realized full-sized tires could get so tiny. The car-park structure had security guards, who kindly checked on our safety. We had a functional cell phone with programmed numbers and were able to call a pair of incredibly generous friends from the church choir, who came instantly to our rescue.
When our friends arrived, the men stayed to join forces with the tow truck operator who had answered the summons for help. We two women took the one functional car and dashed off to Love Field–the airport being the only accessible location where we could secure a rental car at that hour, and then only by a ten minute margin from closing time–and picked up a temporary replacement for our injured vehicle. Then we two caravanned back and convened with the men, who had been dropped off with our lame auto in the alley behind the local auto shop our friends recommended. Leaving our kind friends with our car keys and a commission to get the repair process started in the morning–and leaving a note crammed under the auto shop door–we finally headed back for home only a couple of hours later than planned. And still uninjured, unless you count a bit of a blow to our best-laid plans.
Will you be shocked if I say there was a flurry of very colorful colloquial language indeed in the confines of a certain little red rental car when we got on the road to drive home to our burrow and the ramp leading onto the northbound freeway was completely closed for construction, with no Exit Closed, no foreshadowing, no detour signs anywhere in sight? Some days are like that. Maybe I should be glad that so many of the hours of a less than ideal day were actually wasted away and gone forever. I should at least be glad we got home mostly unscathed, eventually. I know I am very glad, at the moment, that the 29th of February only shows up once every four years.
Some days are clearly beasts of entirely another sort than the expected…
Over the years I’ve learned that there is a huge range of meaning in that puny little word Home.
That broad spectrum has been on my mind a lot during the last couple of weeks.
Early this month my parents visited an apartment complex near where a couple of my sisters live, and shortly after the visit we got a phone call from Mom and Dad to let us know they’d put a deposit on an apartment and would be moving from the house they’ve lived in for a couple of solid decades plus. This wasn’t truly a stunner: it’s something we had all discussed in various ways and at various levels of intensity over the last couple of years. After all, moving was kind of on our minds. My husband and I have changed addresses four times in the last seven or eight years, thrice by short distances for more practical-seeming digs and once across the country for a change of work life. Amid those moves of ours, my mother and father-in-law got on the moving-truck bandwagon and shifted from their own many-years’ home to an apartment as well.
For us the moves were partly logic-driven (so we hope at all times!) and always emotion-driven. No regrets on any of them; they were all the right thing at the time in their own ways. I think Mom and Dad S are satisfied with their life-shift too, and I sincerely hope Mom and Dad W will find as much good in the balance as well. I know surely enough that every gain tends to be accompanied by some tradeoffs, large or small. That’s life. I just spent a few days on a dash-through with my parents to assist with part of the sorting and packing and organization and shopping and networking that their move requires. It’s little enough that I can do, but it always unearths a whole slew of things–objects and thoughts–that center on the Homely concept and how it may differ for each of us and can also change over time.
What I think of most distinctly and frequently in this whole house-related context is of course that thing I mentioned about the meanings of Home.
I’m sitting in the centerpiece of what makes Home for me right now: a very comfortable house in a nice town, and most importantly, cozily perched next to my life partner, love, best friend–my husbandly-type person. Only the tiniest bit of elementary observation necessary to see that this combination provides a goodly batch of Home definitions straight off: physical shelter; a place to centralize my daily existence; comfort and safety and a sense (however delusional) of control over my life and environment. It’s a concrete expression of my sense of how I fit in the world and the pleasures I take in it. It’s a container for my current life story and my history, both personal and in the far broader ways of culture and roots and outright humanity. That’s where I begin to veer off into that lifelong learning curve of what Home means to me.
I think of arriving on Norwegian soil for the first time when I was twenty and being overwhelmed by the sensation of being rooted, blood-connected, of holding hands with my ancestors, in a way that caught me utterly by surprise. I think of listening to my grandparents and aunts and uncles unfurling their memories over me in my childhood and youth and how those people were my Home as much as anything in those days and in turn, the way that learning those bits of family and personal history further shaped my understanding of this whole construct. I think not only of all my grandparents and great-grandparents braving new worlds to create Home in America after uprooting from Norway, to build a new self or job or family or place or all of those things.
I think of my grandfather moving his family back to his hometown in Norway when my mother and her next sister were still very small, seeking a re-creation of Home as he had known it, but ultimately finding that place didn’t fulfill the need as much as his wife and children and his suddenly faraway life did, so with his homesick young spouse in the lead, headed back to the States with their little pinafore-clad girls to restart their own Home on their own coast. And I think of my youngest sister searching out the family history’s effects on her own notion of Home and landing, of all places, in a beautiful Norwegian city where some of Grandpa’s relatives still live and where she’s now been rooted back among them for over twenty-five years.
All of this, jumbled and tumbled together, is what makes Home for me, but the center–the linchpin and the heart of it all–is unquestionably love. Wherever it’s located, however it’s designed, whatever it might constitute in the physical world, Home is clearly all about that connection shared with what and whomever we love most. And that will probably never change for me.
Art-Colored Glasses 