Moving

What is Home

The house is quiet. Our last bird has left the nest; he had left, years ago, then came back for university, left, graduated, managed our rentals here while we explored the reaches of the earth. When we returned there were different plans. Suddenly, he decided it was time and he was gone, taking with him a rustling kind of energy and stress.

Now it’s just quiet. Our dryer died and the repair was expensive so we need to get another one. I’m trying to remember when exactly we purchased it but memories of dryers fold onto themselves. Which dryer when? I do remember we had a washing machine which lasted many years. The repairman told me to keep it as the new machines were not well made. It’s like this with other things too. Our stove doesn’t quite work anymore but it works well enough. Why buy another? How many stoves have I owned in my life? How many of them worked? Our woodstove when I was a child was the best, although the labor of gathering wood each year, a job my sister and I shared, using a baby carriage to ferry the wood from the truck to the basement where it was carefully stacked for the winter.

Life is like this; a series of selves, of people I used to be. I can see her in the corner of my eye. She’s bright and sunny but she’s full of tears. She is angry and frustrated. She will not hold a grudge. Shes too superficial for that. But only superficial on the outside, as her sister told her once.

She makes excuses for other people’s failings and fallibility. Yet she judges. That girl is gone, too many moments have come and gone. No longer sure of anything. There’s comings and goings of people and places. The work she does now requires only love and letting go which she does; trying not to let go of herself in the process.

In the spring Home changed. That was when I (in now time, this version) tried to revisit something. Something which once held meaning but like an old sweater no longer fit nor was quite right. A sentimental object no longer useful.

And then the loss of my Mother. A deepest Home. Our hours of conversations, and even in the last months she gave me terrific advice because she was wise. That’s gone now. Although I initially thought I might be lost, her wisdom is inside of me although sometimes I might disagree.

Meister Eckhart, a German mystic who only avoided being executed for heresy by dying in prison of natural causes, once said (translated from German)

“The only thing that burns in hell is the part of you that won’t let go of your life: your memories, your attachments”.

As all the moments burn away this lifetime lived and hopefully more to come, and an empty home once full of noise and energy. And a phone call that can no longer be made (though I wrestle with my mater at times in my own brain). In this moment, all is well and new miracles happen new synapses collected and connected. The emptiness is a safe place for new growth and forgetting.

My heart reaches towards the sky for the pieces of me that are still there. Echoes of old pieces who have reformed, like the clay in a pottery project; be re-shaped into something else altogether.

Hopefully Beautiful and Useful.