Notions of home we’re often born into, without
stability, to where general geographic areas become home more than specific
piece of land – a neighborhood or more expansive area we bounced around while
developing our human roots. Often times we’re uprooted, perhaps by economics,
perhaps by traumas, maybe weather… who knows, but shit happens, regularly, that
blasts stability sideways. I consider myself from southside Virginia in very
general sense because my sense of home has taken a couple of body shots over
the years, to where the two actual places that are buildings I slept in the
most amount of nights of my life aren’t really my legitimate home any more. One
I don’t ever want to go back to, to be honest, not that specific house, and I
won’t unless somebody dies and familial obligation will force me back. The
other, I still have access to, and my not being there is on friendly terms, but
it’s also not my home any more because home requires that constant exchange of
energy with a place where you see the subtle changes in it and it sees the
subtle changes in you. Where I live now does not feel like home, and in fact is
even outside that general feeling of home relationship I have with southside
Virginia. The shape of things is different, and the culture is close but not
the same, and I don’t know, it just don’t feel like home.
So many humans end up living in places that are
not home. It’s a fairly common thing actually, and it’s perfectly easy to
accept living in a non-home place and make the most of it, but you’re also not
home. I thought on this a lot over the course of two events this weekend.
First, I helped dig a grave, for a woman being buried at home, next to one of
her favorite gardens, and that deep connection to home so impressed me. I’ve
attended a couple home burials in the past, and in fact always joke about how,
being from southside Virginia, I’ve been to two funerals in junkyards. This is
a factual statement, and both were beautiful and completely appropriate events.
But digging a grave for a home burial where home was still known, to such a
deep level… it impressed me greatly. There is a strength in having a lifetime
of connection with a place, one that transcends economics in a lot of ways,
which is why when experts tell people from economically depressed places that
they need to move to where there are better opportunities, and not everybody
jumps at the chance, I can understand that. If you have deep cultural roots to
a place, separate from economics, it is not easy to just assume getting a
paycheck is enough to tear those roots out and try somewhere else, where there’s
no guarantee of financial success.
I also thought about this notion of home during
the Mexico/U.S. Gold Cup final, because that was held in Chicago, and
essentially any U.S. men’s team match against a Latin American country that is
not held in ultra-white spaces like Columbus or Salt Lake City is going to be a
road match for the home team. That was the case in Chicago, where the crowd was
predominately pro-Mexican team, far more than visible support for the U.S.
team. And it got me to thinking of immigration and the political discourse
about that, and all the Mexicans and Salvadorans and Hondurans and others who
traveled so far from their notion of home, simply to find a decent life. And
how you can find that community elsewhere, if there’s enough of you from back
home, to build a little slightly stable slice of that back home in a completely
different place. I don’t see how anybody could be mad at that. That’s really
all any of us want, is to have a home, and feel complete there, and safe, and
know there’s a community acting like family to help us when crisis comes up.
Most spiritual mythologies talk about helping
strangers, and making them feel at home. That’s a deep concept which seems to
be lost upon too many humans these days. To act with compassion, and not just
let somebody into your space to sleep on the floor, but to welcome them, make
them feel as if it is their home too. It won’t, because home is deeper than one
day’s worth of actions – it is woven slowly through time, through many days’
worth of actions, years, even generations. But simply helping somebody to feel
at home shows at heart level, not brain level, not politics level – but right-thinking
heart level that you understand home cannot be manufactured out of nothing, but
you want them to know they are welcome.
It’s a weird feeling not having a strong sense
of specific home any more, and there’s a strange restlessness I get sometimes that
I think comes from that lack of roots. Like I said, it’s not uncommon, but damn
if it doesn’t feel weird, especially on those weird moments where I don’t even
realize I don’t feel at home, but then I roll into the general part of the
Earth that does feel like home, on a perfectly home-like day that activates all
these cellular memories, and it’s just some fucked up moment riding down an old
road, and my body and being is like “ahhh, home” beyond my ability to
rationalize or understand in intelligent scientific way. True home.
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