I grew up in a
“semi-remote” cabin in Juneau, Alaska. When my parents bought the
lot, the home was a pan-abode cabin – essentially a Lincoln-Log
cabin big enough to live in. Barely. My father designed and built a
timber-frame home in its place, every log, brick, nail, and window
packed up from the beach and our trusty 14' Lund skiff. This skiff, a
quarter-mile beach at low tide, or a half-mile walk over the hill and
through the woods were our connection to the road system, the first
and last part of any journey.
From the age of six until
I moved out after high school, my home was tucked out of sight and
mind, hidden in the Tongass National Forest, perched over the Inside
Passages of the Pacific Ocean into Southeast Alaska. Neighborhood
children were scarce, and the few playmates I had in the area tended,
like me, to be happy fishing for Dolly Varden and flounders from the
beach, using mussels as bait; mixing elixirs and poisons both
imaginary and potentially expectorant; adventuring amongst the rocks,
looking for treasures – or any interesting flotsam.
I spent many a dark night
feeling my way over the hill, my youthful imagination making the most
of every shadow and crack in the forest around me. At times on all
fours, feeling amongst the moss and rotting stumps for the void, the
emptiness of the trail, wishing time and again that I had an extra
flashlight, or that I had changed the batteries in the dead one I
grasped like a club, ready to respond to a bear in my face as best as
I could. (The nose is the softest, easiest hit on a bear, with the
best likelihood of resulting in the bear's departure.) One night,
with six inches of heavy, wet snow on the ground, it took over an
hour for my mother, sister, our next-door neighbor, and I to find our
way home in this manner, calling to one another in the dark when we
found what we thought was the path, or when we needed to feel our way
back to each other.
Nightmares of our tiny
skiff being swamped or capsized were not always terrors experienced
from the comfort of bed. At as young as eight, my chores could
include taking the boat to give a parent or a guest a ride to or from
the road when the water was calm. The water was not always calm, and
I was not eight for long. My experience grew, and my luck saved me on
several occasions, such as when I realized just feet from a jetty of
rocks that I was much too close to shore, going full speed in the
dark. Or when the waves stood up just past our beach, crashing over
the stern of the boat even as the bow rose over the crest of the wave
ahead, unable to get far enough up the wave to escape the trough into
which the outboard seemed to pull, a sucking feeling in my heart as I
knew that the ocean was on the brink of swallowing me into its
churning embrace.
In such experiences, I
learned without thinking about the lesson – I had to get home.
There was no other option. Crawl on all fours, feel your way blind
through a forest, turn the boat into the wind. Find home.
With many years of
used-up-luck and slowly earned experience behind me, I now find
myself searching for home once more. This time, I seek not a home
I've found before, but a new abode for heart and soul. The journey
seems more perilous without a destination, and with no idea what
paths might lead me there; but as in my early years, make it home I
must, or live on the road as I seek.
“Home is where the
heart is”, though perhaps tired and worn, is also tried and true,
an adage for the ages akin to the Golden Rule in both simplicity and
longevity. As I ponder the roads ahead, feeling loss and separation
as I am sundered from my community, my friends and family, I return
to this thought. Rejoicing in the moment, in each sunrise and the
opportunities of the new world in each new day, I remember that NOW
is when and where I am, and that the only home I truly need is the
space in which I find myself in that given instant. I can find solace
in the air I breathe, the food I eat, the nutrients and energy
flowing and cycling within and through me. I can love those I love
from afar, remembering their voices, faces, and hearts. The soil
beneath my feet will change as I move over the land, but in letting
go of roots I can find myself a citizen of a larger community, a part
of a world beyond any horizon. Moving into stillness, and finding
stillness in motion: even as I seek a place to put down new roots, I
carry my connections and find that distance does not sunder
friendships or love. Experience will always change us, and our luck
may run out or grow thin, but our history supports us, tying us
together as we weave the here-and-now.
I laugh to myself as I
write these words, my personal mantra of many years resounding in my
mind if not ringing in my ears. I have believed this since I wrote
it, nearly two decades ago in Salt Lake City, but perhaps I am only
now learning how right I was when I first intoned:
nutrients cycle and
energy flows,
here we are, what is:
let's go!
I have not found home
yet, but I carry it in my being, and know it holds me in its safe
embrace, whatever path my feet may tread.
Namaste.
