Anam Cara

4 Homecomings

There is an old shed near my house. Each April, after their long journey from Africa, the swallows return to the same nests in its rafters. They refurbish the nests and soon new little swallows will hatch out there. It is fascinating that the destination of such a huge continental journey is the fragile little grass-and-mud homes in the roof of an abandoned shed. It suggests that one can undertake any voyage if the destination is home. Humble or grand, home is where your heart belongs.

When it is a place of shelter and love, there is no place like home. It is then one of the sweetest words in any language. It suggests a nest where intimacy and belonging foster identity and individuality. In a sense, the notion of home is a continuation of the human body, which is, after all, our original and primary home on earth; it houses the mind, heart, and spirit. To be, we need to be home. When a place to belong is assured, the adventure of growth can begin with great promise.

Driving at dusk through the countryside, one sees the lights coming on in the different homes. One glimpses the bright interiors that house each family. The very ordinariness of these houses conceals the force and mystery of the events that unfold there. Very few other buildings house such transformation. A home is a subtle, implicit laboratory of spirit. It is here that human beings are made; here that their minds open to discover others and come to know who they might be themselves. It is astounding how the seminal happenings in life are mainly unconscious and implicit. Most of what happens within a home unfolds inside the ordinary narrative of the daily routine. Yet later on in life, when one looks back more closely, it is quite incredible how so many of the roots of one’s identity, experience, and presence lead back to that childhood kitchen where so much was happening unknown to itself.

The origin of the word dwell is “to dig deep.” Born into the home, the child starts from the deepest place. In the early silence of childhood, experience becomes deeply engraved. Whatever experience happens here modulates and sets the rhythm of mind and the sensitivities of the heart. If parents were aware of how much secretly depends on them, they would become paralyzed with the weight of responsibility. Home is where we start from, and it inevitably also determines how we start to be who we are. The Oxford English Dictionary states that home also means “a place where a thing flourishes or from which it originates.” In such a subtle and unseen way the home is the seedbed of individual presence.

The simple act of walking into someone’s home can be revelatory. You have stepped from the anonymity of the streets into the sudden, gathered intimacy of a private sanctuary. There is some unwarranted way in which the home displays the presences that it holds and molds. This visual is never available anywhere else. Outside the home its members become different in the various situations in which they find themselves. However, in the home the family as an intricate interweave of presences throws one another into unique relief. While this is usually subtle and can often be largely concealed, it can glimmer through in the immediacy of meeting them all together. If one could discern it, everything is there—on show. This is often the startling recognition looking back years later at family photographs. There one sees oneself as a child looking out at the camera from within your cluster of siblings, most likely innocent to all the psychological and spiritual forces that were at work.

There is nothing as un-neutral as a home. Even the most ordinary home is an implicit theater to subversive inner happenings. It is the most self-effacing laboratory of consciousness quietly shaping belief, expectation, and life direction. Parents are invisible creators. Quietly, day after day, their care and kindness nurture and foster the unseen landscapes of their children’s minds. On the life journey of each individual the nature of the mind determines what is seen and valued. In The Symposium, Plato said so beautifully that one of the highest human privileges is to “be midwife to the birth of the soul in another.” This is the precious and eternal work that parents do; they do this unobtrusively and continuously. Next to birth, bringing a child physically into the world, this is the greatest gift that one can confer on another. It is a gift that, once given, can never be taken away by anyone else, an inner gift that will inform and illuminate their journey.

There is no such thing as perfect parents. All parents make mistakes and inevitably leave lesser or greater trails of damage. In later life it is often a painful and difficult task for a person to discern and integrate what occurred in childhood; this can be slow work, but it can yield great fruits of forgiveness, freedom, and tranquillity of heart.

Despite its huge inner significance for mind and soul, the home is also the locus of a poignant transience. In order to grow up, we have to learn to leave home. There is a beautiful short story by Liam O’Flaherty describing how a mother bird pushes her little ones out of the nest so that they might learn to fly. The wholeness of a home depends much on its ability to prepare its young to leave the nest and risk trusting their own wings to take them to unknown elsewheres, where they will have to build their individual nests. Eventually, parents encounter the challenge of dealing with the empty nest.

Home is where the heart is. It stands for the sure center where individual life is shaped and from where it journeys forth. What it ultimately intends is that each of its individuals would develop the capacity to be at home in themselves. This is something that is usually overlooked, but it is a vital requirement in the creativity and integrity of individual personality. It has to do with the essence of a person, their sense of their own inner ground. When a person is at home in his life, he always has a clear instinct about the shape of outer situations; even in the midst of confusion he can discern the traces of a path forward. When one is at home in oneself, one is integrated and enjoys a sense of balance and poise. In a sense that is exactly what spirituality is: the art of homecoming. AS A CHILD ENTERS THE WORLD

As I enter my new family,

May they be delighted

At how their kindness

Comes into blossom.

Unknown to me and them,

May I be exactly the one

To restore in their forlorn places

New vitality and promise.

May the hearts of others

Hear again the music

In the lost echoes

Of their neglected wonder.

If my destiny is sheltered,

May the grace of this privilege

Reach and bless the other infants

Who are destined for torn places.

If my destiny is bleak,

May I find in myself

A secret stillness

And tranquillity

Beneath the turmoil.

May my eyes never lose sight

Of why I have come here,

That I never be claimed

By the falsity of fear

Or eat the bread of bitterness.

In everything I do, think,

Feel, and say,

May I allow the light

Of the world I am leaving

To shine through and carry me home.

IN PRAISE OF THE EARTH

Let us bless

The imagination of the Earth.

That knew early the patience

To harness the mind of time,

Waited for the seas to warm,

Ready to welcome the emergence

Of things dreaming of voyaging

Among the stillness of land.

And how light knew to nurse

The growth until the face of the Earth

Brightened beneath a vision of color.

When the ages of ice came

And sealed the Earth inside

An endless coma of cold,

The heart of the Earth held hope,

Storing fragments of memory,

Ready for the return of the sun.

Let us thank the Earth

That offers ground for home

And holds our feet firm

To walk in space open

To infinite galaxies.

Let us salute the silence

And certainty of mountains:

Their sublime stillness,

Their dream-filled hearts.

The wonder of a garden

Trusting the first warmth of spring

Until its black infinity of cells

Becomes charged with dream;

Then the silent, slow nurture

Of the seed’s self, coaxing it

To trust the act of death.

The humility of the Earth

That transfigures all

That has fallen

Of outlived growth.

The kindness of the Earth,

Opening to receive

Our worn forms

Into the final stillness.

Let us ask forgiveness of the Earth

For all our sins against her:

For our violence and poisonings

Of her beauty.

Let us remember within us

The ancient clay,

Holding the memory of seasons,

The passion of the wind,

The fluency of water,

The warmth of fire,

The quiver-touch of the sun

And shadowed sureness of the moon.

That we may awaken,

To live to the full

The dream of the Earth

Who chose us to emerge

And incarnate its hidden night

In mind, spirit, and light.

FOR A MOTHER

Mother,

Your voice learning to soothe

Your new child

Was the first home-sound

We heard before we could see.

Your young eyes

Gazing on us

Was the first mirror

Where we glimpsed

What to be seen

Could mean.

Mother,

Your nearness tilled the air,

An umbilical garden for all the seeds

Of thought that stirred in our infant hearts.

You nurtured and fostered this space

To root all our quietly gathering intensity

That could grow nowhere else.

Mother,

Formed from the depths beneath your heart,

You know us from the inside out.

No deeds or seas or others

Could ever erase that.

FOR A FATHER

The longer we live,

The more of your presence

We find, laid down,

Weave upon weave

Within our lives.

The quiet constancy of your gentleness

Drew no attention to itself,

Yet filled our home

With a climate of kindness

Where each mind felt free

To seek its own direction.

As the fields of distance

Opened inside childhood,

Your presence was a sheltering tree

Where our fledgling hearts could rest.

The earth seemed to trust your hands

As they tilled the soil, put in the seed,

Gathered together the lonely stones.

Something in you loved to inquire

In the neighborhood of air,

Searching its transparent rooms

For the fallen glances of God.

The warmth and wonder of your prayer

Opened our eyes to glimpse

The subtle ones who

Are eternally there.

Whenever, silently, in off moments,

The beauty of the whole thing overcame you,

You would gaze quietly out upon us,

The look from your eyes

Like a kiss alighting on skin.

There are many things

We could have said,

But words never wanted

To name them;

And perhaps a world

That is quietly sensed

Across the air

In another’s heart

Becomes the inner companion

To one’s own unknown.

GRACE BEFORE MEALS

As we begin this meal with grace,

Let us become aware of the memory

Carried inside the food before us:

The quiver of the seed

Awakening in the earth,

Unfolding in a trust of roots

And slender stems of growth,

On its voyage toward harvest,

The kiss of rain and surge of sun;

The innocence of animal soul

That never spoke a word,

Nourished by the earth

To become today our food;

The work of all the strangers

Whose hands prepared it,

The privilege of wealth and health

That enables us to feast and celebrate.

GRACE AFTER MEALS

We end this meal with grace

For the joy and nourishment of food,

The slowed time away from the world

To come into presence with each other

And sense the subtle lives behind our faces,

The different colors of our voices,

The edges of hungers we keep private,

The circle of love that unites us.

We pray the wise spirit who keeps us

To change the structures that make others hunger

And that after such grace we might now go forth

And impart dignity wherever we partake.

FOR A BROTHER OR A SISTER

The knowing that binds us

Is older than the apostrophe of cell

We formed from within the one womb.

All that flowed into us there

From the red village of ancestry

Sowed spores of continuity

That would one day flower

Into flickers of resemblance:

An unconscious gesture

Could echo an ancestor,

And the look of us stir

Recognition of belonging

That is ours alone;

And our difference finding

Its own rhythm of strangeness,

Leading us deeper into a self

That would always know its own

Regardless of difficulty and distance;

And through hurt no other could inflict;

Still somehow beside each other

Though the night is dark

With wind that loves

To clean the bones of ruins,

Making further room for light.

ON WAKING

I give thanks for arriving

Safely in a new dawn,

For the gift of eyes

To see the world,

The gift of mind

To feel at home

In my life.

The waves of possibility

Breaking on the shore of dawn,

The harvest of the past

That awaits my hunger,

And all the furtherings

This new day will bring.

ON MEETING A STRANGER

With respect

And reverence

That the unknown

Between us

Might flower

Into discovery

And lead us

Beyond

The familiar field

Blind with the weed

Of weariness

And the old walls

Of habit.

ON PASSING A GRAVEYARD

May perpetual light shine upon

The faces of all who rest here.

May the lives they lived

Unfold further in spirit.

May all their past travails

Find ease in the kindness of clay.

May the remembering earth

Mind every memory they brought.

May the rains from the heavens

Fall gently upon them.

May the wildflowers and grasses

Whisper their wishes into light.

May we reverence the village of presence

In the stillness of this silent field.

TO COME HOME TO YOURSELF

May all that is unforgiven in you

Be released.

May your fears yield

Their deepest tranquillities.

May all that is unlived in you

Blossom into a future

Graced with love.

AT THE END OF THE DAY: A MIRROR OF QUESTIONS

What dreams did I create last night?

Where did my eyes linger today?

Where was I blind?

Where was I hurt without anyone noticing?

What did I learn today?

What did I read?

What new thoughts visited me?

What differences did I notice in those closest to me?

Whom did I neglect?

Where did I neglect myself?

What did I begin today that might endure?

How were my conversations?

What did I do today for the poor and the excluded?

Did I remember the dead today?

Where could I have exposed myself to the risk of something different?

Where did I allow myself to receive love?

With whom today did I feel most myself?

What reached me today? How deep did it imprint?

Who saw me today?

What visitations had I from the past and from the future?

What did I avoid today?

From the evidence—why was I given this day?

BEFORE SLEEP

As I lay down to sleep,

May the guardian angel

Watch over me,

Coaxing all my cares

To unravel into peace.

As darkness within

Is wed to darkness without,

Freed from the weight of light,

Let my eyes sleep,

Relieved of all intensities.

Let my imagination

Trawl the compressed seas

To bless the dawn

With a generous catch

Of luminous dream.

May this new night of rest

Repair the wear of time

And restore youth of heart

For the adventure

That awaits tomorrow.