homing
You must learn one thing.
The world was made to be free in.
Give up all the other worlds
except the one to which you belong.
Sometimes it takes darkness and the sweet
confinement of your aloneness
to learn
anything or anyone
that does not bring you alive
is too small for you.
David Whyte, from “Sweet Darkness”
As spring quickly blossoms, it seems that the grass in my backyard grows greener every hour. Last year, my partner and I decided to gradually convert as much of our lawn as possible into more functional wildlife — prairie grasses, wildflowers, trees, food plants, medicinal herbs, and so forth. Already in the small ecosystems we’ve created, we witnessed last summer’s arrival of new frogs, bees, butterflies, insects, birds, and, I’m sure, all manner of things underground. The last few days of rain have provided the right conditions to continue the project. Grass lifts easily from wet ground. Cool breeze feels delightful as I hunch down, turning over heavy networks of roots.
Many have quoted and re-quoted it: “A society grows great when old men plant trees whose shade they know they shall never sit in.” As I dig out the grass, I wonder: how long will I live here? How long will I enjoy the fruits of this labor?
* * *
While many others are expressing lamentations of being trapped indoors, I’ve found myself blissfully separated from the rest of my community. It is a privilege: a comfortable home, an agreeable partner, a respite from the responsibilities of work. I’m grateful for not needing to drive anywhere, and not needing to wake at any certain time.
In the last few weeks, many of us have discovered a different kind of living: one which is oriented inward. One which centers the responsibilities of home and family, rather than of labor. Yet the impulse to turn to constant internet chatter and digital communities is greater than ever. Perhaps we’ve lost our disconnection — the sacred aloneness of experiencing what truth arises from purely being ourselves, without any performance or feedback. Turn any direction and you’ll find someone touting the benefits of not using the internet for some period of time (and then inevitably returning to the internet to share that experience). While we all wish we were less dependent on these technologies, the discomfort of this moment seems to be pushing us deeper down that rabbit hole.
Among friends and colleagues, I’ve heard many wishes for things to “return to normal”, and while I too will enjoy the day when I can welcome visitors into my home without considerations of disease and mortality, I am concerned about our collective desire to be unaffected. It’s not that we are simply taking a vacation in another, albeit somewhat dystopian, life; this is life — the moment in which we find ourselves living. Just as some events have irrevocably changed the way we design our society (September 11), others have decidedly not (Columbine, Sandy Hook). When restrictions finally ease, will the relief give us amnesia for all the lessons we’ve learned — and could have learned — in this time?
From every direction, self-proclaimed gurus are shouting their methods: how to cope, how to find balance, how to escape this new reality, how to create a pocket of time or space that makes us forget our world and our concerns. But mindfulness offers us a different path: one of non-judging, one of patience. “Life is not composed of good times and waiting-for-good times,” I reflected last winter. How would we spend these days if this were simply how we lived? How would we spend these days if we did not judge this unfamiliarity as bad, but simply unfamiliar? In the scale of things, not being able to frequent our favorite bar or cafe seems rather unimportant, given all other justifiable reasons for distress.
While good-hearted people tout meditation as a tool for relaxation, focus, or “clearing your mind”, the heart of it seems at once both simpler and more profound than any of those things: that mindfulness is not an escape, but an embracing. It is not a way to change anything about ourselves, but, as Jon Kabat-Zinn said, “being yourself and knowing something about who that is.”
Sogyal Rinpoche described meditation as “bringing the mind home”:
“Through meditation our mind begins to settle, and as it does, something extraordinary takes place: all the fragmented aspects of ourselves come home, and we become whole.”
As we sit in our homes, so do all the fragmented aspects of our selves: our impatience, our boredom, our desire for attention; our identities dissolving with our work; our long-suppressed relationship contentions now in close proximity. What would happen if we acknowledged these things, looked them in the face for just a moment? What might we learn about our selves, about what’s important to us, about what matters right now?
Later today I’ll go back outside and continue digging grass. Who knows how long I’ll have the gift of enjoying this mud and this garden? Perhaps I won’t even live to see seedlings planted in the ground I’ve cleared. No matter. Today, I have what I have. The world seems at once much smaller and much bigger than before. Sitting here, I see tree branches swaying in wind that rattles the walls and windows. Amid all this commotion, stillness: there is nowhere to go and nothing to do.
