Home can be a time as well as a place. It teaches us who we are and how to live today. Listen to this 11-minute read!
I belong to Fall. When I step through my screen door to stoop and caress the matt of lamb’s ears and find them covered with morning dew, I know that I’m coming home. Pinpoints of moisture float in the first sunbeam like plankton swirling in an ocean swell. The honey bees are shaking the cold from their furry bodies and taking lazily to flight. Even the domineering hummingbird is taking frequent breaks on a branch of the crimson Japanese maple, offering to the warming infant light an outpouring of crystalline song between bursts of its throbbing flight.
The pace of Fall is just my speed. There’s a hurried excitement grounded by plumply fattened and insulated bodies. There’s a final savoring and tucking away of sweet bits and sun rays. There’s a lowering and softening of the light even as the leaves stoke their embers to capture every last bit of warmth. The heat of the day slips quickly, fluidly into the cool ground of darkness that rises ever more eagerly to crowd out the day.
These are the hours to curl inward, to slow and soften into a season of savoring and reflecting on all that has been witnessed, created, and gathered. To listen to the whisperings that lie beyond what we can see, touch, and taste. To sink into the earth that gifted us the bodies it will receive at our death, and reach into what lies beyond in that great, dark void the way root hairs crawl towards each other following subtle scents and magnetism.
This is the season of feeling our way when we cannot see clearly, of being schooled in the twin necessities of liberation and uncertainty. It is a time of hibernating and digesting until a new way is revealed. It is a time perfected by the birth of our solar system for teaching us how to live on the threshold of societal and planetary collapse.
“We are all lost without (a) sense of home. And it is easy, living in cities where the ground is covered in concrete and the trees are planted in boxes, to forget that the earth beneath our feet is the same earth as that of the wilderness. Home is, of course, not simply a physical place. It is a sense of belonging, of remembering and being remembered, put back together again when our journeys into the world have fractured and fragmented our sense of self. But we are physical beings. Our bodies are made of the same stuff as the rest of the universe and gravitate to specific places on the earth where this belonging is felt at a cellular level.
I do not know why, but I do believe that for each of us, there is at least one place on the earth where our hearts and our bodies are mended and renewed. We need to find and go to these places if we are to learn how to dance… How can we recognize (them)? By the way they let us sit still… To live deeper, we have to go to the places that help us find a slower rhythm.
Going to a place on the earth that speaks to us is not enough. We have to be able to listen with the very cells of our being to truly receive what the place has to offer us. But if you can listen, what you will hear is the truth you may have forgotten, the truth that lets you sit still, the truth that who you are is enough.
This is what home is: not only the place you remember, but the place that remembers you, even if you have never been there before, the place that holds some essential piece of you in trust, waiting for you to return when you go out into other places in the world, as you must.”
Oriah Mountain Dreamer writes in “The Dance” (pp 114-121)
There are a handful of places on earth that invite silence and offer renewal to me in this way – places that took my breath away when I was near them and leave my heart tender and aching when I think of our separation: the hills of Tuscany, the highlands of Scotland, the little creek and marsh running through the Reed College campus in Portland that I wrote about last year, majestic mountains anywhere.
But if I let my longing and seeking for these places consume me – or wait for our reunion to heal me – it will be my undoing. I have taken enough trips, made enough inspired and reckless life choices, and have found as much pain as healing in even the specialist places. When I listen to the earth closely enough to receive healing, I also sense its ache – its longing for more space, for more freedom, for greater thriving. So much has been stripped, sterilized, manicured, and overrun. The Highlands hold echoes of the ancient forests felled, Tuscany of battles and plague, Reed Canyon of an entire network of watershed marshes diverted, drained, and sealed.
The power of each place is in the way it sustains the essence of what once was, the heart-breaking, inspiring resilience in how it clings to that legacy through the scent of peat, crumbling limestone, a solitary egret stalking through a patch of skunk cabbage at the edge of an invasive blackberry tangle.
I – like these places – find my roots in something ancient and long past that endures through its undeniable impression on the soil of body and psyche. Despite decades of trying my best at the American dream and then succumbing to self-destruction, two things are clear. I’m madly in love with this planet. And I do not belong in the world we’ve built here. I write because I know I’m not the only one, and every single one of us needs all the reminders we can get so that we don’t go crazy or forget what really matters.
I’m convinced that even if I had the inspiration and resources to travel the whole world I would find pretty much what I see outside my home every day: a collection of living things clinging to shreds of beauty and dignity and hope while longing to live and express themselves more fully; just like me. We long for clean air and water, rich soils, hundreds of thousands of miles to burrow and soar and expand. Unfettered access to a vast array of food and mates and other species to collaborate and compete with – fulfilling our unique place in the Universe’s grand experiment of what is possible.
I don’t believe that a true home exists for me anywhere on present-day Earth. The poison of humanity’s dominance has seeped into every molecule on the planet. But I’m blessed by not needing a physical home to rest. My place of belonging finds me every day and every year, and there is nothing I need to do to make it happen except wait. Fall arrives every year. And every day, its presence is echoed through dusk’s diminishing warmth, rising darkness, and inward call.
Here at the threshold of death, I am nearest to all things that have passed, including those I love most: all the great civilizations who valued art and exploration and interdependence; all the great forests and reefs and flocks and herds; all the harsh realness of surviving in a living world, alert and humbled by forces mysterious and awe-some. If I lived those any of those places now, I don’t think I’d last a week. I’ve been far too coddled by modern comforts. But my pulse quickens and my psyche perks at the edge of the abyss into which the past has fallen, because to be alive on the Earth at this time is to stand on the brink of something both unprecedented and encoded in our DNA.
We are all survivors of apocalypse: mass extinctions, ice ages, volcanoes, famines and plagues. Facing annihilation calls up both the potential for destructive panic or numbness, and for reclaiming the deepest and best of what we are in our core: creative, communal survivors of catastrophe. It isn’t easy or comfortable, but it’s real. It sparks something in me to life, something thrilling and essential, akin to what I imagine the salmon feels at the scent of its river, or the beaver feels on finding the perfect sight for a dam. It beckons me to step more fully into the adventure of what I am destined to be.
I belong to Fall. It revives me with the collision of warmth and cold, the intermingling of light and dark. It girds me for holding the tension between living or dying in every choice I make about how I treat my body, how I talk to myself, how I hold space for my feelings, and how I carry the knowledge that everyone and everything I encounter values its life as much as I (aspire to) value mine.
All the times I fail to choose the life-affirming path expands my compassion for humanity’s failure to stop ourselves from destroying what we need to survive and what we love most deeply, even if we’ve forgotten: the more-than-human world that birthed us.
In nature, there is no failure. Birth and death come as seasons and without judgment. Fall shows me how to let things be as they are.
Nancy
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Nancy, you have beautifully anthropomorphized Fall like christening the fog bank Karl or dedicating a stretch of highway after a local hero, and that’s a revelation to me. Whereas I had always treated seasons as part of the weather — completely out of my control and to be accepted and managed — you have internalized and taken ownership, and you seemingly feel autumn in your bones.
From this I hear a call to turn my attention to,
What does Fall mean to me?
Thank you for this glimpse into your belonging.
Hi, Rob. I love that this post inspired you to explore your own relationship to the seasons. I think one of the challenges we face in our relationship with nature is coming to understand we are a part of it as opposed to it being a part of us. Instead of anthropomorphizing the land, I’m attempting to rewild myself. How do I experience myself more as a river or molecule or raven instead of seeing them behaving like me? How do I assume a posture of service to everything instead of seeing how it can serve me, even through a seemingly innocent search for home or healing?
Your expression that there is no true home for you on this Earth completely resonates with the nomad in me.
“Here at the threshold of death, I am nearest to all things that have passed…” This frightens and awes me, as it feels like I see you standing at a precipice, and I want to reach out and grasp your hand, even as I hear the echoes of the great civilizations and resist the urge to intrude and interrupt that connection you have with the forces mysterious. There’s a magnet simultaneously attracting and repelling. I feel like pulling back and leaping in at the same time.
I appreciate you calling out this passage, Rob. I find that living on the planet at this time with my eyes and ears wide open brings a felt experience of many contradictions: grief and gratitude, passion and apathy, compassion and resentment, acceptance and outrage to name a few. Because this is a time of great complexity, I find it crucial to withstand the discomfort of this tension long enough to receive clarity regarding a simple, immediate action. Its a time of discipline and endurance as we attempt to realign not to our impulses, but to a new understanding of Right action. I explore this more in today’s post “Making Reparations”. I look forward to your thoughts.