An eloquent write from Brendan at Real Toads provides us with a prompt entitled Home. Please red his soulful introduction below before moving on to my poem.
As one who moved around a lot in his earlier decades, the eventual finding, making and sustaining a place I call home has resulted in the most productive and content chapter of my life.
The yearning of my wandering years—a sea-wide yearning that some day I would find lasting harbor—was the homesickness of the never rooted, much like that of an orphan hoping to one day to reconnect with a lost mother or father. And now, having formed a deep sense of place over the years in this location I call home, homecomings are always dear, whether it’s from coming back from a trip (as I have just done, visiting an old father in Pennsylvania who prays to die in his house), or simply driving back home after another day working in an office at the far end of a commute.
I’m very aware how fortunate I am, and give thanks for it daily; it is a privilege I do not greatly deserve, and I understand how readily, randomly and viciously the Wheel can turn round the other way. But not today.
More than 65 million people world-wide are refugees, displaced from their home due to political instability. Very few—about a hundred thousand—return to their homes every year, while an equal fraction find new homes in new countries. The rest are in limbo, with no welcome behind or ahead of them. And as global warming floods populated coastlines and turns vaster tracts to desert, the number of these homeless refugees will tower. They may become the defining demographic of our present century.
What happens to the heart when one loses their home? Glenn Albrecht, an Australian philosopher and professor of sustainability, put it this way:
People have heart’s ease when they’re on their own country. If you force them off that country, if you take them away from their land, they feel the loss of heart’s ease as a kind of vertigo, a disintegration of their whole life.
Albrecht observed that many native inhabitants — Australian aborigines and any number of indigenous peoples around the world—reported this sense of mournful disorientation after being displaced. But he also found that many people feel this same sense of “place pathology,” not because they had been removed from home soil, but as their home communities became ruined by development.
In a 2004 essay, Albrecht named this condition solastalgia, a combination of the Latin word solacium (comfort) and the Greek root –algia (pain), which he defined as “the pain experienced when there is recognition that the place where one resides and that one loves is under immediate assault . . . a form of homesickness one gets when one is still at ‘home.’” Albrecht even called solastalgia is a depressive mental condition.
Solastalgia may be the melancholia of the Anthropocene, to grow so homesick in our sickening home.
Finally, this. I’ve just finished a second reading of Peter Matthiessen’s In Paradise, published just after his death in 2014 at age 86. A difficult tale, the novel is set in Poland in the mid-1990s and follows a meditation retreat in the death-camp of Auschwitz. For three days, people of various national, religious and philosophical bent meditate and attempt to bear ecumenical “witness” to one of the most horrifying relics of Nazi Germany’s final solution to racial impurity.
Over the course of this night sea journey Matthiessen raises and dispenses many questions: Whether any but a survivor of the death camp experience can bear true witness to what happened there. If there can be any legitimate response to a place of annihilation. Whether any true voice or presence of holocaust can still be heard there. Can humanity ever be free of the guilt of such altars of genocide? If the sins of this place are forgotten (denied even), then what can keep the fourteen thousand throats of Muslim men and boys in Srveneika from being slashed fatally wide, as they will be at same time this story is set? (As we who have more recently watched the children of Aleppo bombed to dust their by their own government while we fretted about Donald Trump, the answer is Nothing.) And are the unburied dead still present, hungry ghosts for whom our lament is forever insufficient food?
Tough questions, and Matthiessen is sparing in his answers. Auschwitz is what it is, and no one living passes through that morgue of the spirit without catching its chill. A rabbi leads participants in the Kaddish or Prayer for the Dead at the Black Wall, where some 30 to 40 thousand prisoners were shot to death in the early years of the camp. “It is the voice of the living calling out prayer across the void to the nameless, numberless dead who do not answer,” he says. Most of Matthiessen’s answers are calibrated by that silence.
But Matthiessen observes this: After three days of meditation, prayer, encounter and hard debate among the participants in this Hadean harrow of death, many felt a homesickness as they were leaving—as if by making space for inhumanity and death inside themselves, their humanity was enlarged. The only whole heart is the broken heart, but it must be fully broken—another rabbi says that in the shadowy gloom of the Oven—and strangely, on the last night they are there, those utterly broken by the encounter find themselves suddenly dancing like children, as if they had come home at last. It’s an utterly unexpected gift, hilarious, profane, perfect.
Go figure. What do we know about the heart, that compass whose pole star ever points us toward home? Well, let’s find out. Write a new poem on the theme of home in one of these variations or as a tandem or contrast of several: home, longing for home, losing a home, homelessness, homesickness, finding one’s way home, homecoming, making a home, wrecking a home, offering sanctuary to strangers in one’s home, homesickness at home, leaving home, leaving one’s home in this life for the next.
Let’s find out what this home business is all about: Then bring your discoveries back home to the Garden.
— Brendan
~~~~~
home
it’s one of those words
that if repeated oft enough
sounds strange
to my ears anyway
my home was first Manchester
born to Irish immigrants
and taught to drink and fight
the latter i learned to avoid
because i was really a softer being
than they could let me be
i could not wait to leave
some home
now forgotten
erased
my only connection now the football team
that gave some tenuous thread for us to bind with
until my son decided to move there recently
strange circles
his mother left her home too as a young girl
eagerly
adventure bound
then she met me
places to stay
homes of a kind
came and went
three children and countless moves later
i sit at the table of the one place we stayed more than 4 years
where my 3 children breakfasted
where my wife and i entertained
friends and each other
where the band(s) sat and
smoked spliffs and swilled drams
until dawn
returned from gigs and full
of that surge of energy
rooted in the exchange
of audience
and performer
where festive dinners were eaten
and photographs snapped
where plans were hatched
and dreams unfurled
where we began a long and lasting change
where lives where set afloat
on a sea of unknowing
where all of it and more
came to pass and to leave a
solemn mark upon this soul
then were truths spoken that broke us
spinning me out into another place
both geographical and emotional
for years
distant yet closer
no place like home
no home any place
and whispers of love that began to heal us
and time spent in the old place
this old place
i have spent time here and there
these past years
following the beat of my own drum
to places new and exotic
to communities who were waiting
for what i could bring
the traveler
the freeman
ha ha ha
if only they knew
lost perhaps would be more accurate
but as i teach my students
when poly-rhythmic mis-connection
is about to explode their rational brains
and time and place takes on a wobble-like quality
‘if you know you are lost then you’re OK
it’s when you’re lost and you don’t know it that you’re really fucked’
home is where the heart is
they say
there were times when my heart was so expanded
that my only home could be the universe itself
which may explain why this house is no longer my home
or any house for that matter
cept perhaps the one i carry with me everywhere
the universe inside
one day i will unlock fully the messages of my own heart
a lifelong search for home
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
img source~ http://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/month-look-skies-pleiades-constellation-and-comet-180957327/
A beautiful photo… but shouldn’t there be a poem too?
Fixed. Thanks Bjorn.
I don’t think I’ll ever know myself completely, or have a real home, but I think I can live with that now.
I’ll keep on looking until I can’t anymore.
I completely empathize with this poem. I was born into an existential crisis, too soft for the hard-scrabble Chicago inner-city, unmoored by other unforeseen events. This is a deep dive into melancholic meditation.
Thanks
A comment i can relate to 😉
I wonder if we can ever–safely–open ourselves to the work and into the world? It would be grand, though… especially once our experience have outgrown the space we occupy, the place we call home, the land that birthed us…
Who knows Magaly. One can but try 😉
I can’t remember where I last encountered Hiraeth — the old Welsh word for homesickness — but this breathes new life into it, as an equation read in reverse, the spirit whose house was built of fleeting wood. And yes, there is a home inside which we carry with us everywhere, makes every habitation in the real life seem shabby and passing. Thanks for for generously participating in the challenge.
Twas the generous prompt which led the way.
There is a part of me that will always feel I haven’t found home.
Maybe that’s just the way of things for some of us?
The universe inside, yes. It seems several people are coming to this conclusion, in addressing this prompt!
Perhaps there is a universal truth there. Thanks for reading.