Homing

Hestia, Greek goddess of home and hearth

To Hestia
by Hesiod

Hestia, you who tend the holy house of the lord Apollo,
the Far-shooter at goodly Pytho,
with soft oil dripping ever from your locks, come now into this house,
come, having one mind with Zeus the all-wise
draw near, and withal bestow grace upon my song.


This weekend I watched The House (spoilers ahead), a Korean animated film in which old, traditional homes are guarded by and are one with spirits who must face their imminent deaths as new, modern condos replace old, dilapidated buildings that are full of  mold and cracks. (See photographs documenting this process here, along with some unfortunate sexist comments.) These building spirits harbor a certain affection and intimacy with home owners, so much so that a carefully kept home will respond kindly to the rhythms of its family. This is a sad story, so skip the next three paragraphs if you don't want to know.

The film makes a clear argument for valuing the soul over the bank account, and it offers a strong, if heavy-handed critique of classism in contemporary (Korean) society, the role of the government in exacerbating poverty and dependence, and the overvaluation of all that is modern. It is understood that the new buildings will have no spirits to guard them.

In "Modernization and contemporary culture in traditional Korea," Ito Abito explains:

Traditional Korean society manifested, as Takashi Akiba long ago pointed out, a rather sharp cleavage between the life-orientation of the upper-class yangban and that of ordinary commoners. The yangban, absolutizing Confucianism, looked down on or ignored folk religion, but the coexistence of the two strata was made possible by their division into two social ranks. The new life-orientation developed in the cities in connection with the rapid social change of recent years, however, has exercised a profound influence even on agricultural village society through the Semaeull movement and other media. Members of the rural elite, quick to respond to the modernization and industrialization policy of the central government, played a leading role in abolishing or discontinuing traditional belief and practice, some in token of symbolic support for modernization, others in token of loyalty to the Semaeull movement. This resulted, on the one hand, in the diffusion of the Semaeull movement throughout the country as a new spiritual movement and, on the other, in the rapid destruction of the basis for cultural identity that existed in the traditional culture.

In the film, as the houses are torn down, the spirits go with them, leaving only keepsakes: small trinkets in which their favorite memories are stored, visible only to those who hold the marble that connects the human and spirit worlds. In the end, this delicate glass ball is smashed by a government boot in the mud, and the spirits, in their dying moments, become invisible to our heartbroken protagonist, who had happened upon the marble in a brawl with a stray cat (who is, of course, the God of Land). She who once longed to live in a shiny new condo, is dragged silently away from the falling walls.

What struck me about this surprisingly—though accurately—pessimistic tale was its lovely portrayal of what it means to have a home. At one point, the girl and her house's spirit happen upon a homeless man in a box. The girl screams, taken aback by the man. The spirit looks and also screams, taken aback not by the man, but by the idea that a person should sleep somewhere where there was no house, no spirit to protect him.

Of course it went beyond the walls and ceiling: every little bit of the house, the old wallpaper, the worn floors, was infused with a sense of belonging, of safety. That, in my view, is why home matters so much. There are places that feel like that, and they are sacred. Buck claimed that "'home' in the full range and feeling of [Modern English] home is a conception that belongs distinctively to the word home and some of its Gmc. cognates and is not covered by any single word in most of the IE [Indo-European] languages" (Online Etymology Dictionary). In Spanish, the corresponding hogar has its roots in the Latin term for fire (compare modern Spanish fuego); indeed, the hearth was the old gathering place, the center of warmth and social life (Diccionario Etimológico).



We feel that way around certain people, too—at home, safe. In her article, "The orphans among us," Sarah Johnston contemplates what it meant to her to finally find a family, as an adult, when her own parents had never provided a safe place, a refuge:

It took a year and a half before I would see their daily call and not think, “Why are they calling?” I had no idea there were people who’d call you every day.
     Eventually I did. Eventually it became the most natural thing in the world. The Bible says that orphans are placed in families; and for a long time I believed in that and mistook having a family as the end, — the prize in and of itself.
     But what I have found — and what I pray the orphans among and inside us discover —is that being a part of a family, in time, stops erasing the pain of abandonment and starts being about the power of the future. It begins with an orphan and a family, but it ends with one trajectory being propelled into another.

The desire to be where we feel we belong is strong, and we are not alone among the species. Holly the cat recently became famous for her 190-mile journey on foot back to where she belonged.

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Touchdown

Today we witnessed the touchdown of NASA's rover Curiosity on Mars. It has already sent back its first pictures.

How exciting to glimpse other lands, other stones! I often thought as a deeply star-gazing child upon whom gravity worked harder than most, such that I dragged myself and later rolled and tumbled across the floor, that I would be the first to sign up to leave this planet, a first colonist.

Yet, as I age, I realize that am deeply attached to the earth, as echoed in Caetano Veloso's love song to Earth, "Terra."

Eu sou um leão de fogo                        [I am a lion of fire
Sem ti me consumiria                           without you I would consume myself
A mim mesmo eternamente                  myself eternally
E de nada valeria                                 and it would matter nothing
Acontecer de eu ser gente                   that I happen to be a person,
E gente é outra alegria                         and a person is another joy
Diferente das estrelas...                       different from the stars...]

 

This attachment goes beyond humanity. Anthropologist and primatologist Dawn Prince-Hughes, in her memoir Songs of the Gorilla Nation: My Journey through Autism (which I recommend; see a good "non-review" here), writes of her experience of walking and standing, of pulling her body upright, as a painful separation:

Physically, I thought about how standing up on two feet leaves you exposed. One's naked belly and chest and genitals are all uncovered and laid bare, as if standing has lifted a great warm cover made of the sacred space between body and ground. Like a plant uprooted, with the last of its anchor and succor falling in abandoning clods, we stretch up to the sky and let the close and nourishing earth fall away. This standing had often been too much for me to bear, and when it was, I would go and curl up somewhere, nursing the raw wound that my upright front had sustained in the million-year tearing away that my ancestors had undertaken. (p. 121).

In explaining her affinity with the gorillas she studied and worked with and loved, she explained:

What I found I had always had with the gorillas was such vulnerability and ferocity and love. Our similarities were beyond perseveration, a need for space and a space for hiding; we were always drawing inward and exploding outward, sharing laughter out of fear and sharing a ferocious sense of justice, beyond mere caring. Our similarities also went beyond a difficulty dealing with the human race, sensitivities to the world around us and to the stereotyping in the face of the soullessness all around. Our affinity met in being filled with archaic darkness and persisting memories of a time when all things were one. (p. 122)

Sacred Rock. Machu Picchu, Peru.

We are earth beings. Now, perhaps always, as New York Times contributor Adam Frank somewhat sadly pointed out in his piece, "Alone in the Void."

Since time immemorial, the earth stones have been watching our growth. Do we not caress them and spill our tears and blood into this great rock? And our waste, too, and our bombs of rage? What better than the earth to serve as witness to all promises, all covenants made between living beings? Who better to know when we have forgotten ourselves?

Image found here.

Come now, let us make a covenant, you and I. And let it be a witness between you and me.” So Jacob took a stone and set it up as a pillar. And Jacob said to his kinsmen, “Gather stones.” And they took stones and made a heap, and they ate there by the heap. Laban called it Jegar-sahadutha, but Jacob called it Galeed. Laban said, “This heap is a witness between you and me today.” (Genesis 31, 44-48)

For all it has seen, the stone, the earth, like a stillness we can create in our own spirited flesh, offers the relief of an energetic, living silence:

Thomas Aquinas said that beauty arrests motion. He meant, I think, that in the presence of something gorgeous or sublime, we stop our nervous natterings, our foot twitchings and restless tongues. Whatever that fretful hunger is, it seems momentarily filled in the presence of beauty. To Aquinas’s wisdom I’d add that silence arrests flight, that in its refuge, the need to flee the chaos of noise diminishes. We let the world creep closer, we drop to our knees, as if to let the heart, like a small animal, get its legs on the ground. (from Stirring the Mud by Barbara Hurd, © 2001 by Barbara Hurd, from Tricycle)

I do not think that have ever felt the earth so keenly, so close, as when I lived in Mexico. There, in Cholula, at the foot of the great volcano Popcatepetl, artifacts of tiny clay faces, rain gods and jaguar-men, surfaced around the edges of ancient dusty roads. When the volcano erupted, the ground would rock slowly, like being rocked in the arms of someone who has forgotten just how little you really are.

Cholula with an erupting Popocatepetl. From A Gringo in Rural Mexico

Here is a poem of mine about the land of Cholula. The title, Huellas, has several meanings, including footprints, fingerprints, traces, and tracks. (The story of Footprints was one of my favorites as a child, and I carry a hint of this into the poem as well.) (Trigger warning)

Huellas

I

Five hundred years ago, a burned white man broke

ground for Catholic rites, the pyramid cradling

gold-spun idols. Today, a child crawls underneath mud

stone upon stone in small doorways, ancient

stories painted on the walls where her ancestors knew

one day she would laugh, remembering how

everyone always leaves a trace of what was, even

if it was not worth it. Even if we are lost in the end.

II

She is a cherub, round and brown

like the angel cheeks: they cried wax tears

where her mother knelt in a copal cathedral.

That whole month her knees were bloody

and she kept those flowers she picked

dried and thirsty among the saints

the day the youngest of her dozen

came home, defiled and married, but home.

III

At the market on Wednesdays, downy

chestnut-skinned fruit is split open to seduce

buyers who will suck out the burnt orange

dripping mamey, only to say it is not

yet ripe, let me try another, because

the uncut ones always taste best

and cherubs who do not run home fast

will most certainly get eaten alive.

IV 

The golden hour thickens in vapor,

lightening pouring red through woven cloth

windows. Just about any two bodies here

know each other to be sacred and hold

like a cross against the salted earth,

against the stumbling gait of those damned

by ancient pictures and buried ash. Volcanoes

boom and the ground, it breaks, it trembles. 

© 2010 J. Aaron

Mutable caress: On water, impermanence, and trust

I grew up with my toes in the Willamette River.

Crossing the Willamette River
Eugene, Oregon, February 21st, 2011
(from I'd rather be riding... )

I loved to stare at it, immerse myself in it, float down it in a passive stance that once sent my mother flying into the current screaming. I had shouted a contented "Bye!" as I floated past and away. At the ocean, I would stare out as far as possible, convinced I could see the curve of our planet, and then the sky as a dome above, and me so tiny there, seized by deep passion.

Why such love, such fascination?

In its nature, water teaches us impermanence, in the Buddhist sense of the term:

According to the teachings of the Buddha, life is comparable to a river. It is a progressive moment, a successive series of different moments, joining together to give the impression of one continuous flow. It moves from cause to cause, effect to effect, one point to another, one state of existence to another, giving an outward impression that it is one continuous and unified movement, where as in reality it is not. The river of yesterday is not the same as the river of today. The river of this moment is not going to be the same as the river of the next moment. So does life. It changes continuously, becomes something or the other from moment to moment. (from Urban Dharma)

Loblolly Creek, Gainesville, Florida
© 2011 by Friends of Nature Parks

Impermanence goes beyond philosophy. It is a basic state of nature in physics as well. For a more technical discussion of this notion in both Buddhism and modern physics, see Victor Mansfield's 1998 article, "Time and Impermanence in Middle Way Buddhism and Modern Physics," originally a talk given at the Physics and Tibetan Buddhism Conference at the University of California, Santa Barbara.

The other day, on a rainy walk to the local creek with my dear friend and her dog, I witnessed such a lesson in very simple terms. The dog was thrilled with a tennis ball that we had discovered, and he was chasing it and carrying it around as he bounded up and down the creek. Spotting an interesting stick, he placed the ball in the shallow water. A few minutes later, tiring of the stick, he returned for the ball, only to find that it had disappeared downstream. He looked up to us, confused. Why is my ball gone? Who took it? In our grief and our loss, we often look skyward, confused. Why? But this is just the nature of the world, as gentle and as reasonable as the flowing creek. And we do not mourn each ripple as it flattens and disappears. We call such perpetual motion beautiful.



Yet this is not really about loss, but about change. In its nature, water also teaches us a kind of permanence. It is liquid, gas, or solid. It is internalized and externalized. It remains a continuous, dynamic entity, paradoxical in its changing faces. And it is in the continuity and connectivity that we find something akin to hope.

Ecclesiastes 1:7 All the rivers run into the sea; yet the sea is not full; unto the place from whence the rivers come, thither they return again.

Conceptual Photos by Olaf Mueller

Systematic, apparently chaotic, and deeply faithful in its journeys, in its ebbs and flows, water offers us a territory of trust.

There is also another water we all know: the primal water of the womb. When else are we embraced so entirely and so safely? When else are we touched by another so completely? The healing, often magical power of touch is a taste of what we once knew: nearly total connection, before the first shock of becoming separated and, perhaps, feeling lost.

Camelia Elias, in her blog Taro(t)flexions, writes of the honesty evoked through touch and visualization:

Underwater: Photos by Erin Mulvehill

Whether imagined or not, touching is a participatory rather than an individual move. When we say, ‘I’m touched,’ about something, we first get the visuals in place and then the abstractness of the situation. Touching is therefore quite magical. For instance, there is a powerful relation between asking people to imagine things and physically touching them. Touch relating to visualization is the most complicit of acts. When people allow you to touch them in that way, they strip naked for you. Yet their nakedness only serves to give way to a translucent light right into their souls.

When water encircles our bodies, we are also vulnerable and touched. This offers another reminder of our erstwhile selfless selves, a vague yet urgent thirst for the unity we knew in a time beyond memory.

Yet the water out here is not insular. It carries us or it passes us by. It cannot bear to stay still. Still waters stink and fester. Stagnant, they invite diseases and no longer draw our loving gaze.

My Willamette is not a pretty opal shine, steady and posing for a grateful human eye. This is my Willamette:



"Nothing was, nothing will be, everything has reality and presence" (Siddhartha, Herman Hesse, trans. Hilda Rosner, 1951, p. 87).

And perhaps herein lies its true lesson: even in the constant flux of relationship, the objects carried away to unimagined lands, the memories that ripple as the wind and time transform their edges, and our own selves as we erode, nothing is really lost, and we are still safe. And we are greater than we think. Through all of this, the water embraces the life it carries, the rivers still find each other, the ocean still looks to the moon. And yet nothing is ever the same.

Siddhartha listened. He was now all ears, completely absorbed in his listening, completely empty, completely receptive; he felt that he had now learned all that there was to learn about listening. He had often heard this all before, these many voices in the river, but today it sounded new. By this time he could no longer distinguish the many voices, could not tell the gleeful ones from the weeping ones, the children’s voices from the grown men’s; they all belonged together, the lament of longing and the knowing man’s laughter, the cry of anger and the moans of the dying; it was all one, it was all interwoven and knotted together, interconnected in a thousand ways. And all of this together, all the voices, all the goals, all the longing, all the suffering, all the pleasure, all the good and evil, all of this together was the world. All of this together was the river of events, the music of life. And whenever Siddhartha listened attentively to that river, that song of thousand voices, when he listened neither to the sorrow nor the laughter, when he tied his soul not to any individual voice, entering into it with his self, but instead heard them all, perceiving the totality, the oneness, then the great song of a thousand voices consisted of a single word, which was om, the absolute. (Siddhartha, Herman Hesse, found here)

In what is left, do we find the soul of us, the divine spirit, the one sentience? Is that what we water-leaning, toe-dipping creatures truly seek?

Slow time

We must begin to think differently, perhaps: We have all the time in the world. Of course, this is a lie, and we know it. But pushing the egg out of the nest accomplishes little good.

Lottie and Minnie, from elevisions

A lesson delivered in tumbled syllables is not learned. Hurried intimacy is not intimate. Forced conversation does not build the relationship so desired. In the rush for bliss, bliss is lost. This is about restraint and purpose. In our work, it may be about making intellectual connections and diving into the depths of the springs with measured breaths. In our bodies, it may mean long walks and all-natural ingredients. (See, for example, the Slow Food movement.) In our relationships, it may be about listening and tenderness.

John Huckins, a blogger at God's Politics, contemplates the role of "wasting" time in Jesus's life:

As I walked the modern-day ruins of this site, I couldn't help picturing a 20-year-old Jesus working next to his dad while listening and living a radically submerged life within this context. While shaping rock that would act as foundations for buildings whose use he may or may not have agreed with, Jesus was present.

Jesus was not just present for a year or two; he was present for 30 years before entering his formal ministry.There is an element of lingering inherent with submerging. It is a willingness to be present to the point of feeling like we are wasting time, when in reality we are leaving ourselves open to be used by the Spirit in ways we be might otherwise have never been aware of. Lingering is not simply walking aimlessly in circles; it is knowing what we are looking for and being intentional with our time and presence.

Sigur Rós - Glósóli from Arni & Kinski on Vimeo.

In The Creativity Post, Michael Michalko notes that famed surrealist Salvador Dalí, in his search for the artistic visions that populated his works, had a certain technique. He wasted time, drifting in and out of sleep:

His favorite technique is that he would put a tin plate on the floor and then sit by a chair beside it, holding a spoon over the plate. He would then totally relax his body; sometimes he would begin to fall asleep. The moment that he began to doze the spoon would slip from his fingers and clang on the plate, immediately waking him to capture the surreal images. (more here)

How many spoons? How many hours? And yet, do we fault him for this? Should he have been out working harder, painting more, without spoons or tin plates? What kind of artist would he have been? Would our vision of the world have been the same without it?


Two of my favorite children's books talk about the value of giving your heart to the squandered moment: the wandered road or the accidental friendship. In Grasshopper on the Road (1978), an open-minded grasshopper on a walk encounters all sorts of characters: beetles who have political tunnel vision and only love mornings, a worm who is fastidious about his belongings, butterflies who cling to routine, a fly who cannot stop sweeping.

Cat's makeshift home

All of them live in the trance of daily life, without contemplation, filling their days in ways that will never be enough, never make them full. Ah, but the grasshopper, he alone seems happy.

The second book, J.T. by Jane Wagner, is about a young man who is struggling with bullies and with his own sense of morality discovers a half-dead cat. He builds it a makeshift house, feeds it, and visits it every day.Through patience and love for something that has been left to struggle on its own, obviously seen as a "waste of time" to all who had passed by the wretched (beautiful) creature, J.T.'s spirit is transformed. The photographs are by Gordon Parks, Jr. (more here on this and its relevance to black history and film, with spoilers). The book is from a movie, the first part of which I've posted here. I warn you, it is a very, very sad story. But it teaches us something about slow love.



I must admit here that my advocacy of slow living does include some self-interest. It is only with such a mindset that those of us with disabilities become truly equal. It is in the loss of preoccupation with routine and norms that we find space for the diverse physiology and neurology of the human species. Too often, those of us who have disabilities are discarded: our gaze is not met, our words are not heard, our love is not reciprocated. This is not a consequence of the disability itself, but of the social forces that tell us to avoid "wasting" time, that push us to reach our goals as quickly as possible. Indeed, if you spend time with me, things will go more slowly. I might "waste" your time. And the same might be said for the soft-spoken, the tangential thinkers, and those from distant lands. Do we really not have time to lift somebody's weak body out of a car, to wait for well-thought-out words to emerge from hesitant lips, to follow a roundabout path of cognitive connections, or to bear some of the communicative burden of a tongue that carries what we perceive as an accent? What exactly are we here to do?

A focus on the process draws our attention to a space of loving presence.

I admire gleaners, those who pick up odd things from the road because they are interesting, these things others have discarded, forgotten, or simply walked by, unnoticing. I value this because it means they can see as others cannot. It means that, in their eyes, I, too, might be good enough to keep.

French filmmaker Agnès Varda is a visionary, I believe. In the spirit of gleaning, I leave you with her full-length documentary on the idea, both in the history of French art and as a practice of survival in France today.


Les Glaneurs et la Glaneuse from WDROTV on Vimeo.

At home with the cats

Numbus II, 2012. Cloud in room. More here.

The rain is falling heavily today, with thunder and a dark heat that reminds me of other homes: Oregon in the fall, Puebla in late summer afternoons. It is exhilarating when the sky cracks open.

Rainbow against warm-gray sky; Eugene, Oregon.
© Greg Vaughn

At least, stuck in my house like this, I will not make my cats angry over abandonment.

This poem captures it so well, the sorrow of the feline (warning: this is sad; also, enlarge it if you can, to see the words):

And now to cheer you, a cat poem, found here:

The cat's song
By Marge Piercy

Mine, says the cat, putting out his paw of darkness.
My lover, my friend, my slave, my toy, says
the cat making on your chest his gesture of drawing
milk from his mother's forgotten breasts.

Let us walk in the woods, says the cat.
I'll teach you to read the tabloid of scents,
to fade into shadow, wait like a trap, to hunt.
Now I lay this plump warm mouse on your mat.

You feed me, I try to feed you, we are friends,
says the cat, although I am more equal than you.
Can you leap twenty times the height of your body?
Can you run up and down trees? Jump between roofs?

Let us rub our bodies together and talk of touch.
My emotions are pure as salt crystals and as hard.
My lusts glow like my eyes. I sing to you in the mornings
walking round and round your bed and into your face.

Come I will teach you to dance as naturally
as falling asleep and waking and stretching long, long.
I speak greed with my paws and fear with my whiskers.
Envy lashes my tail. Love speaks me entire, a word

of fur. I will teach you to be still as an egg
and to slip like the ghost of wind through the grass.

Marge Piercy, “The cat's song” from Mars & Her Children (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1992). First appeared in Matrix 28 (Spring 1989). Copyright © 1989, 1992 by Marge Piercy and Middlemarsh, Inc. Used by permission of the Wallace Literary Agency, Inc.

Source: Mars & Her Children (Alfred A. Knopf, 1992)