Home

Whenever you travel there is always a tug at first, a delicate thread attached to home that reminds you that you are from somewhere, that there is a way out of the maze; a thread that trembles and shudders with small vibrations like the radius of a spiderweb, taut but alive with movements and voices and thoughts from far away. It is a comfort, this lifeline; it promises to haul you back out should you fall too deeply into newness, into strangeness, into things too foreign to understand. That line helps you be daring, allows you the strength of mind to take risks and to move farther and farther away in body and spirit. It is a magnet, a field of intangible pull.

And so you live, learning the new, practicing new habits, new words, new physical maps. You sleep and wake and eat and do the things that constitute life, and time washes past. To move deeper, to be more fully present in the where you are now rather than the where of your roots and thread, you must pull a little harder, or cease tugging altogether. There are moments when you need to forget about the line and decide to be now and not else. It is difficult to live with longing, and sometimes it is easier to learn without the thread pulling your mind back to a place that cannot understand the one you are physically in.

One day, you notice that the tug is no longer the same. A shift has occurred. The polarity has flipped, and what was once an attraction becomes strange, a push and not a pull. You realize your eyes have grown, and with them your vision has changed. Your thoughts have changed, and with them your judgments reversed. Your needs have reversed, and with them your sense of self is without plot or plane, out of place in all territories but a quiet mind.

It is not that home is no longer good or safe – it is not that you learn to hate what you once loved. It is simply a matter of change – as when young adults leave the family house for an independent life, or when a summertime friend from camp is re-met after a school year apart. In returning, things are different. You cannot come back to the same place. You can only hope to reforge a new connection with things as they newly are, one that will provide a new sense of safety, of belonging, of history and rightness and self. I find that my own sense of home has been made strange by a lot of travel in my life – there is no place that comes to mind, only a network of love, however distant. My parents’ support; the understanding and spirit of a handful of friends – things that are constant are home – everything else must fall away or risk perversion and damage upon return.

I asked Paul what he felt here, and I loved what he said about loneliness and appreciation – “I think about being in my mom’s house,” he said. “Talking to friends on the phone; going to baseball games with my dad.” These are the things that are home for him. For me, I think of my mother’s psychic clothesline, and Audrey’s hugs and humor, and Bob eyes, and Joseph’s voice. I think about our books. I think about how good it feels to ride a bicycle that really fits me in a city that appreciates it. My bicycle here is far too small and I pedal with my knees deeply bent, but I like that it is something that people do in many places in the world, that it is a small freedom and a big knowledge and a relative independence. I have had to jettison much of the baggage I brought with me, attachments and concerns and ideas and expectations. The things that are left, however, are weightless, and precious, and have revealed so much to me about the nature of what I have – the friends who stay connected, who are concerned and excited about what I’m doing; the inspiration and advice I continue to draw from my graduate mentor, who is now living a new life as a poet-artist and yet continues to guide my academic life; the importance of effort in a relationship, the communication that my partner and I share in order to help and love one another better. I feel not so much homesick as homewell, appreciating more what I have been given by my family of friends, and letting go of needing it to be anything other than something that is, something that is here now, and something that we will enact, perform, negotiate, celebrate – however differently – when we return.

~ by knifemaker on October 13, 2007.