There’s No Place Like Home
UU Fellowship of Midland, MI
October 17, 2004
Jane Thickstun

 Reading

The reading is from an essay called “High Tide in Tucson” by Barbara Kingsolver from a collection of essays by the same title.

            When I was twenty-two, I donned the shell of a tiny yellow Renault and drove with all I owned from Kentucky to Tuscon.  I was a typical young American, striking out. . . . I am the commonest kind of North American refugee: I believe I like it here, far-flung from my original home.  I’ve come to love the desert that bristles and breathes and sleeps outside my windows.  In the course of seventeen years I’ve embedded myself in a family here – neighbors, colleagues, friends I can’t foresee living without, and a child who is native to this ground, with loves of her own.  I’m here for good, it seems.

            And yet I never cease to long in my bones for what I left behind.  I open my eyes on every new day expecting that a creek will run through my backyard under broad-leafed maples, and that my mother will be whistling in the kitchen.  Behind the howl of coyotes, I’m listening for meadowlarks.  I sometimes ache to be rocked in the bosom of the blood relations and busybodies of my childhood.  Particularly in my years as a mother without a mate, I have deeply missed the safety net of extended family. 

            In a city of half a million I still really look at every face, anticipating recognition, because I grew up in a town where every face meant something to me.  I have trouble remembering to lock the doors.  (Wariness of strangers I learned the hard way.  When I was new to the city, I let a man into my house one hot afternoon because he seemed in dire need of a drink of water; when I turned from the kitchen sink I found sharpened steel shoved against my belly.  And so I know, I know.)  But I cultivate suspicion with as much difficulty as I force tomatoes to grow in the drought-stricken hardpan of my strange backyard.  No creek runs here, but I’m listening to secret tides, living as if I belonged to an earlier place: not Kentucky, necessarily, but a welcoming earth and a human family.  A forest.  A species.

 

Sermon

 

            In The Wizard of Oz, Dorothy dreams of going “somewhere over the rainbow.”  She ends up going to Oz, which may in fact be over the rainbow, but isn’t the blissful place she had imagined.  So she wants to go home, and goes through many adventures on the journey.  At the end, she finds that she always had the ability to go home, and all she needs to do is tap the ruby slippers together three times and say, “there’s no place like home.”                        

            The journey leads home.  We are all on a journey home, exploring, seeking, looking for our heart’s desire; and no matter how far afield we go, in the end we are searching for our home.  Home is that place that feels safe, that nurtures us, that is the center of the universe.  Home is a place that offers us comfort even when we are far away, a place we can go when we feel the need to be restored.  In those moments when we really do feel at home, we feel complete, like nothing is lacking.

            In the reading, Barbara Kingsolver talks about leaving her native Kentucky to settle in the desert of Arizona.  She talks of the mixed feelings of feeling settled and committed to her “new” home of 17 years, but still yearning for that home she left behind. 

            I can relate.  I feel a great attachment to Potsdam, NY, the small, college town in northern New York I grew up in, but I haven’t lived there since 1980, and no family has lived there since my parents left in ‘84. 

            Potsdam has become a mythical place for me.  It becomes idealized in my mind as the perfect spot.  The bleak, colorless landscape, the long, long winters, the absence of anything to call spring except lots of mud created by melting snow, the bitter cold, the lack of good restaurants, the rural poverty (barn roofs falling in, trailer parks, wayside bars):  all of it is beautiful, because it is home.  Potsdam also has a river running right through town that’s deep enough and clean enough to swim in, and great swimming holes not far out of town if you know where to go.  It has the best pizzaria anywhere, that has been run by generations of the same Italian family, and has been there since at least 1968, when my family first moved there.  It has great musical events, thanks to the Crane School of Music at Potsdam State, and wonderful community theater.   Because of the two colleges, there are always interesting and educated people around, and new people coming through all the time.

            Potsdam can remain ideal for me because it is unattainable.  I can’t return there to live unless I want to be a college professor or a bartender.  I don’t have a PhD, so I can’t be a professor, and I have been a bartender, and its not worth it, even to live in Potsdam.

            We all yearn for some idealized version of our childhood home.  We yearn to feel safe and taken care of.  We wish to find a place where we can be accepted, just as we are; where we can relax and not worry about anything.  Ultimately, we have to leave home, and we make our own homes which can be quite comfortable, and yet we yearn for something that feels just as safe, just as comforting as that original home that was provided for us.  Even if our original home wasn’t particularly safe or comforting, we have a concept of such a place and yearn for it no less than those who had the happiest of childhoods. 

            Often these yearnings are tied to a particular landscape.  Kingsolver talks of the creek and the broad-leafed maple and the meadowlarks.  My yearnings involve hills and views and swimming holes.  Definitely deciduous forests.  When I was in search before coming here, I limited my search to the northeast, expanding that to include anything from North Carolina to Wisconsin.  Kingsolver admits, “If someone had told me what I was headed for in that little Renault . . . I surely would not have done it.  But no one warned me.”  She says, “I am carrying on . . . in a desert, two thousand miles from my verdant childhood home.  I am disembodied.  No one here remembers how I was before I grew to my present height.  I’m called upon to reinvent my own childhoood time and again; in the process, I wonder how I can ever know the truth about who I am.” (p. 14)

            Writer Wendell Berry, another native of Kentucky, returned to his beloved Kentucky to put down roots.  Now at or near retirement age, he farms and writes near where he grew up, where his family has lived for generations.  Berry says, “much of the interest and excitement that I have in my life now has come from the deepening, in the years since my return here, of my relation to this place.  For in spite of all that has happened to me in other places, the great change and the great possibility of change in my life has been in my sense of this place.  The major difference is perhaps only that I have grown able to be wholeheartedly present here.  I am able to sit and be quiet at the foot of some tree here in this woods along Camp Branch, and feel a deep peace, both in the place and in my awarentess of it, that not too long ago I was not conscious of the possibility of.  This peace is partly in being free of the suspicion that pursued me for most of my life, no matter where I was, that there was perhaps another place I should be, or would be happier or better in; it is partly in the increasingly articulate consciousness of being here, and of the significance and importance of being here.” (The Art of the Commonplace, p. 22)

            Our spiritual connection is often realized through a connection to a place.  Knowing a place well, becoming intimate with the landscape, can lead to intimacy with the deepest source of life itself. 

            Scott Sanders is a writer who is grounded in Bloomington, Indiana.  In his book called Staying Put, Sanders says, “It has taken me half a lifetime of searching to realize that the likeliest path to the ultimate ground leads through my local ground.  I mean the land itself, with its creeks and rivers, its weather, seasons, stone outcroppings, and all the plants and animals that share it.  I cannot have a spiritual center without having a geographical one; I cannot live a grounded life without being grounded in a place.” (Staying Put, p.120-121)

            Grounding ourselves in a place means making a commitment to that place.  Berry notes that in returning to Kentucky, he made “a significant change in [his] relation to that place: before,” he says, “it had been mine by coincidence or accident; now it was mine by choice.” (Berry, p. 7)   To commit to a place deepens the relationship with that place immensely. 

            But we don’t have to return to our home landscape to experience the value that comes from committing to a place.  We don’t even have to find a place that calls to us particularly, though that certainly helps.  But any place will do.  Sanders tells us, “There are no privileged locations.  If you stay put, your place may become a holy center, not because it gives you special access to the divine, but because in your stillness you hear what might be heard anywhere.  All there is to see can be seen from anywhere in the universe, if you know how to look; and the influence of the entire universe converges on every spot.” (p. 115-116)

            I made the deliberate choice to commit to a place when I was living in Highland Park, in the northern suburbs of Chicago, before I went to seminary.  I was aware that I was longing for what Potsdam represents to me - the small town, the rural landscape.  Meanwhile I was not feeling a part of my local community, and was at odds with where I was living, even though I was not making plans to leave.  At one point I made a conscious decision to be where I was, to like the place, and stop wishing I were in another place.  It was a liberating choice - here I had been feeling trapped by circumstances into living in a place that didn’t suit me, and that was turned around by my choosing to live in the place where I was living.  I was helped by something my old friend Marcus Aurelius wrote in his Meditations that has stayed with me through the years.  He is feeling the pull, the tendency to blame his location for the restlessness in his soul, and he says: “Where life is possible at all, a right life is possible; life in a palace is possible; therefore even in a palace a right life is possible.” (V-16)  Even in a palace!  Well, then I can certainly manage in a metropolitan area!

            Another reason for making a home in a particular place, for committing to a place, is that it enables us to better fulfill our responsibilities to the earth.

            Though we are responsible for our relationship with the earth, we only tend to realize our responsibility in the context of a committed relationship to a particular place.  The poet Gary Snyder describes the difficulty in today’s society of living in harmony with the land.  “One of the key problems in American society now, it seems to me, is people’s lack of commitment to any given place--which, again, is totally unnatural and outside of history.  Neighborhoods are allowed to deteriorate, landscapes are allowed to be strip-mined, because there is nobody who will live there and take responsibility; they’ll just move on.  The reconstruction of a people and of a life in the United States depends in part on people, neighborhood by neighborhood, county by county, deciding to stick it out and make it work where they are, rather than flee.” (Sanders, p. 113) 

            We have lost our connection to the land.  This not only hurts our souls, it hurts the land we inhabit.  And because we are all connected in the interdependent web, what harms the land harms us.  Sanders says that  “for even the barest existence, we depend on the labors of other people, the fruits of the earth, the inherited goods of our given place.  If our interior journeys are cut loose entirely from that place, then both we and the neighborhood will suffer.” (p. 103)

            Making a home involves more than a commitment to a place.  It involves an interior journey as well.  Just click the heels of your ruby slippers together, and say the words, there’s no place like home, and - presto! you’re home!  But it’s not that easy.  First Dorothy had to go through all that scary stuff.  She had to kill the wicked witch.  And we often have to go through some real ordeals before we can find the way home.  We have to leave home in order to find it again.  We have to go away, to search and explore, and ultimately the journey leads home.

            Sanders describes this feeling: “The search may begin with a restless feeling, as if one were being watched.  One turns in all directions and sees nothing.  Yet one senses that there is a source for this deep restlessness; and the path that leads there is not a path to a strange place, but the path home. . . . The journey is hard, for the secret place where we have always been is overgrown with thorns and thickets of “ideas,” of fears and defenses, prejudices and repressions.” (p. 155)

            My beloved, mythical Potsdam represents to me a physical landscape I long to return to, but it also represents a place in me that I long to return to.  I have a certain nostalgia for the life I led there, for who I was at that time, for a part of myself I feel I’ve lost touch with.  It was the innocence, the immediacy, the ability to live more in the moment.  I am aware I have romanticized it,  just as I have romanticized the physical location.  I am aware that going there involves something other than going to Potsdam.  It means finding my home in my heart, creating that safe harbor inside myself. 

            When we feel at home in the heart, we find it easier to make our home anywhere in the physical landscape.  Finding home in ourselves is a connection with the source of our being, the source of all being.   We can sense the holy in any landscape.  Sanders says, “Pilgrims often journey to the ends of the earth in search of holy ground, only to find that they have never walked on anything else.” (p. 154)  Or as Dorothy says: if I ever go looking for my heart's desire again, I won't look any further than my own back yard. Because if it isn't there, I never really lost it to begin with!

            In closing, I’d like to share a poem by Mary de La Valette:

I do not have to go
To Sacred Places
In far-off lands.
The ground I stand on
Is holy.

 Here, in this little garden
I tend
My pilgrimage ends.
The wild honeybees
The hummingbird moths
The flickering fireflies at dusk
Are a microcosm of the Universe. 
Each seed that grows
Each spade of soil
Is full of miracles.

 And I toil and sweat
And watch and wonder
And am full of love.
Living in place
In this place.
For truth and beauty
Dwell here.

             And truth and beauty dwell here, too, in this fellowship, in this community, in this landscape, in your homes and in your hearts.  These are holy places.  I wish you blessings on your journey as you find your way home.