This is such a resonant phrase; I often give it to my writing groups as a prompt. It engenders an immediate and often visceral response, and usually a juicy piece of writing.
There are so many kinds of coming home. There’s the actual act of arriving at the dwelling in which you live. Feeling the comfort of your own bed, after a long trip, or just a movie or dinner out. Opening the refrigerator with its motley collection of leftover pasta, five kinds of cheese, a fuzzy cuke, and door full of half-used condiments--you see the newly mowed grass, the garden you planted yourself, the dog that bounds to you with a euphoria that feels new every time you appear and feel the enfolding of their familiar shelter.
Or, in imagination, to your childhood home, the bedroom you had all to yourself.
Mine was in a ranch house my father had built in a small town in Connecticut, now a big burgeoning city. My sister and I have plans to go and see it after all these years; the owner has let her in once and is willing to again, with me this time. On Zillow, when I look at the ghastly renovations they have made, I notice that the built-ins so popular in the fifties are still there. I had shelves, cupboards, a desk, and bureau, all built in, painted neon pink. Those shelves held my collection of Nancy Drew books, all the Landmark ones, some Madame Alexander dolls on the top shelf. The desk where I drew all my biology assignments, pictures of hummingbirds, amoebae and frogs connected to the bureau where I hid a contraband copy of Bonjour Tristesse under my Carter’s spanky pants.
I still have that blue loose-leaf, all the drawings.
To some of you, walking into a church, attending Mass and communion will feel this way. I was taught as a child that the most perfect of all homecomings was death in the state of grace, so I could go directly to heaven, to sit the lap of God. I’m not sure what I, as a seven-year-old (the age at which we were prepared for communion by confessing a list of sins to a priest in a dark box behind a screen) could possibly have made of that idea.
Then there’s the feeling of belonging to a group, of a coming together with people with like-minded ideas or purpose. Boy or Girl scouts, an athletic team, yes, a church community, a book group, a writing residency, a profession, and especially today, a political party--the support and solace we can have from being affirmed by others who think and believe as we do.
A specific person can feel like home. When I hug my husband of fifty-nine years, I am home in a way I can never be with another. Seeing my son is a homecoming as well, particularly now that he lives so far away. When I go to the cemetery where my younger son is buried, I experience a sense of abode that I wish I didn’t have to have. Being with my sister brings a wash of memory of our long, shared life, all its warts and wonder.
There’s the wow, I get it! that comes from reading a poem or a book filled with ideas that closely resonate with one’s own--connection in the abstract but solace all the same.
When I arrive at Mercy by the Sea at the Connecticut shore in a few weeks and see the women I’ve written with for so many years, our joyful embraces, and the vulnerability we will share in days of writing together I know will feel like falling into a sea of familiar solace. We will be buoyed by each other enough that we can take that experience home to nurture ourselves for days and weeks to come.
But the matchless and most important of arrivals is coming home to oneself. A few weeks ago, I traveled to Barre, Massachusetts, to a place called the Forest Refuge. It’s an offshoot of Insight Meditation Society, a stunning haven of mindfulness practice founded in the seventies by Joseph Goldstein, Sharon Salzburg, Jack Kornfield, and others who wanted to bring the meditation they’d discovered in India and Burma, to the west.
After my son Geoff died in 1987, I lost my sense of self, who I was and had been. All my moorings came loose, and I had no anchor to swim to. I’d left the church of my childhood years ago and had found no other spiritual haven. Psychology, therapy, the new belief systems I’d embraced in the seventies, provided no relief.
I was homeless.
On one of many trips to Taos to study with Natalie Goldberg, where I discovered my voice in writing but still felt adrift, I met a woman who insisted I come to a meditation retreat in the mountains nearby.
“It will change your life,” she said.
I mightily resisted, but finally acquiesced. And it did change my life, some thirty-three years ago. I clung to the anchor I’d finally found, my own battered soul, embraced in a refuge of kindness and support. Over the years, I’ve “sat” for hundreds of hours, watching my thoughts, feeling my sensations, uncovering stuff I’d not even known was there.
I came to understand self-forgiveness, letting go, impermanence, and how to witness the thoughts and feelings that course through my mind without possessiveness.
And that of course it’s hard-- but that I can always start over in the next moment.
As I drove up the long hill to the Forest Refuge, all of the peace and centering I so needed after the summer of struggle with my husband’s illness, operation, and months of recovery, reached out to welcome me. Each day of the week I was there, the busy world fell away a little more, the silence and total lack of distraction allowed me to be with myself in a way I had not been in a long time.
I’d come home.
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May you all be happy, may you all be peaceful, may you all be safe, may you all be free.
For those of you interested in finding out more about mindfulness practice and IMS, here is the link: imsnews@dharma.org
As always, thanks for reading and for the responses you send me. I so appreciate them.