For the second time in my life, I am making a home in a land far from my own. I am gradually finding my feet in a new culture, where a distinct variation on the English language constantly renders the familiar unfamiliar. "Let's go home," my son will, say, and he means home to our place in Connecticut. "We're going home in the summer," I say, and I mean to my homeland, though in fact we no longer have a home there, if by that you mean a place to live, a place to sleep.
What does it mean to be at home, to feel at home, to have a home, to make a home? Frederick Buechner reflects on the fact that even in a nicely appointed home one can feel homeless:
Wendell Berry follows the same idea down a different path: when you can't settle at home, when all that comfort is no comfort, what then? Berry writes of leaving home to find peace in the cradle of the earth:
What does it mean to be at home, to feel at home, to have a home, to make a home? Frederick Buechner reflects on the fact that even in a nicely appointed home one can feel homeless:
We lie in our beds in the dark. There is a picture of the children on the bureau. A patch of moonlight catches our clothes thrown over the back of a chair. We can hear the faint rumble of the furnace in the cellar. We are surrounded by the reassurance of the familiar. When the weather is bad, we have shelter. When things are bad in our lives, we have a place where we can retreat to lick our wounds while tens of thousands of people, many of them children, wander the dark streets in search of some corner to lie down in out of the wind.
Yet we are homeless even so in the sense of having homes but not being really at home in them. To be really at home is to be really at peace, and there can be no real peace for any of us until there is some measure of real peace for all of us. When we close our eyes to the deep needs of other people, whether they live on the streets or under our own roof—and when we close our eyes to our own deep need to reach out to them—we can never be fully at home anywhere. ~from Wishful Thinking
Wendell Berry follows the same idea down a different path: when you can't settle at home, when all that comfort is no comfort, what then? Berry writes of leaving home to find peace in the cradle of the earth:
When despair for the world grows in meand I wake in the night at the least soundin fear of what my life and my children’s lives may be,I go and lie down where the wood drakerests in his beauty on the water, and the great heron feeds.I come into the peace of wild things... from The Peace of Wild Things
I haven't sung it for a long time, but a song I used to include in my set was a riotous version of an old folk song from a feudal setting. The Raggle Taggle Gypsies is a story of a woman born and wed into comfort, wealth and power who throws it all away to find freedom and love with some travellers. If you think about it too hard you might wonder whether she would eventually regret giving up wealth for poverty, or a warm bed for a cold field. But that isn't the point of the song: I love the defiant joy of it, the rejection of hierarchy and the recognition that wealth and power can't bring you life in all its fulness--in fact, they may keep you from it. I never recorded this song, but The Water Boys do a great version:
Without a doubt, home is more than a shelter, more than a place to lay your head. But in mid-January, while the snow lies thick on the ground, I am grateful for a place to call home even though it doesn't always feel like home, doubly grateful that the roof is fixed and we don't have leaky ceilings any more, and thinking about those who have no fixed place to sleep at night. This would be a good week to make a donation to a charity that gives food and shelter to people who have none.