Walking through a doorway
This morning I was on BART and saw a middle-aged woman with a faded tattoo under her right forearm getting ready to disembark. Her bag bore the “SFO,” tag, indicating that she was coming from somewhere else, and returning home. I pictured a moderately furnished, well-lived in, middle-class home in El Cerrito that was not going anywhere. It somehow triggered thoughts related to the feeling of “going home,” and what it has meant to me at different times of my life. Home between homes, having two sets of them, two sets of parents in two places. Home from college, two worlds apart, a deafening silence, a lack of activity and free gaiety, yet certain elements of constancy, despite change, even in one’s parents and home(s). Home after travelling through Europe, living in China. Home after working and living on my own. Each time the idea of stepping through that door was something that held echoes of so many past hours stretched out over years. Slight varying of inputs in a complex, slowly evolving chaotic system (life).
There is a part of me that cannot help associating “home” with “mother.” I think the same could be said about my dad, or my step-dad, but being without is the starkest kind of contrast. When my mom passed last year, January 31st, I had no job, and little money. It could not have come at a worse time. The economy was hopelessly depressing. I was forced to move back in with my step-dad, three brothers, and sister, into a cramped and confused house fraught with grief and confusion not yet fully articulated. Perhaps it was a good thing that I was there, rather than far away, yet, for many months, this idea of home, without the clicking restlessness of my mom’s heels, or her laugh, made no sense to me. I have reached the point where I can see this place as home-and after all, these people are my family, whom I love dearly-yet, when reflecting on the matter, I found myself thinking of the old trope, “You can’t go home again.”
In the last few years of her life, my mom had separated from my step-dad, leaving me effectively with three different houses to call home. The house my mom moved into had a distinct identity which suited her, and I think I inherited her sense of “just right”ness when it comes to finding the appropriate place to live or shirt to wear when I start the day. There was a big garden outside, with a small population of lawn gnomes, who frequently found themselves upended in strange locations. I found it hard to accept this separate, too-proper place as also home, after so many years of returning to that chaotic house on the hill, where, upon the night of my arrival, me, my mom and step-dad, would talk late into the night around the kitchen platform, laughing and reminiscing. I still think of home as that house on the hill with the big yard. She always said she hated the wind from up there.
Now I find myself thinking about home again, as I prepare to move to Taiwan and finally begin a journey I have been leading up to for some time. Home is here, for the moment, but soon it will be somewhere far away, and up to me to make it. Those other homes will still be around, but how will past, present, and future, warp together, when I see them again in the future?
I enjoy the sensations of déjà vu I get from being in a very normal place, doing something mundane, and having it seem profound and strange. I’ve heard it’s possibly the memory circuits of the brain accidentally spilling out unduly into the present. I have used a toaster, countless times. I am using a toaster again. This toast is the toast of the present, yet every toast I toast, links me to toast of the past. The repetition of food and place makes them ripe for such experiences. I understand better why old people tend to linger in the past, weighed down by aggregating memory.
Meditation is also like this. The purpose of ritual, in this capacity, is to eliminate as many variables as possible, to focus on mind, on the nature of inner existence within a given moment. Naturally, when given free reign from additional input, present mixes more freely with past (or future). How many times have I sat in different places? How many times have I enjoyed a cup of tea in the same spot? Experience and ritual links us through time and space.
I would suggest that much of modern alienation comes from not being able to see how things relate to each other. “Home,” is itself a ground-state, a point of mental reference. When your world is disrupted, when your mind is too scattered, it stops making sense. You don’t see how you fit into anything. You start to wonder why you are in a room, any room.
When you are connected, or in flow, every place is the right place. It’s quite magical. I have observed, many times, the same streets, at the same times, change before my eyes, based on my perception. In Kokikai Aikido we have the principle, “positive mind.” It is the most important one, and also the hardest. After five years of training, I have some sense that real internal power/sense of well being is not possible without it. Gassho!
There is a part of me that cannot help associating “home” with “mother.” I think the same could be said about my dad, or my step-dad, but being without is the starkest kind of contrast. When my mom passed last year, January 31st, I had no job, and little money. It could not have come at a worse time. The economy was hopelessly depressing. I was forced to move back in with my step-dad, three brothers, and sister, into a cramped and confused house fraught with grief and confusion not yet fully articulated. Perhaps it was a good thing that I was there, rather than far away, yet, for many months, this idea of home, without the clicking restlessness of my mom’s heels, or her laugh, made no sense to me. I have reached the point where I can see this place as home-and after all, these people are my family, whom I love dearly-yet, when reflecting on the matter, I found myself thinking of the old trope, “You can’t go home again.”
In the last few years of her life, my mom had separated from my step-dad, leaving me effectively with three different houses to call home. The house my mom moved into had a distinct identity which suited her, and I think I inherited her sense of “just right”ness when it comes to finding the appropriate place to live or shirt to wear when I start the day. There was a big garden outside, with a small population of lawn gnomes, who frequently found themselves upended in strange locations. I found it hard to accept this separate, too-proper place as also home, after so many years of returning to that chaotic house on the hill, where, upon the night of my arrival, me, my mom and step-dad, would talk late into the night around the kitchen platform, laughing and reminiscing. I still think of home as that house on the hill with the big yard. She always said she hated the wind from up there.
Now I find myself thinking about home again, as I prepare to move to Taiwan and finally begin a journey I have been leading up to for some time. Home is here, for the moment, but soon it will be somewhere far away, and up to me to make it. Those other homes will still be around, but how will past, present, and future, warp together, when I see them again in the future?
I enjoy the sensations of déjà vu I get from being in a very normal place, doing something mundane, and having it seem profound and strange. I’ve heard it’s possibly the memory circuits of the brain accidentally spilling out unduly into the present. I have used a toaster, countless times. I am using a toaster again. This toast is the toast of the present, yet every toast I toast, links me to toast of the past. The repetition of food and place makes them ripe for such experiences. I understand better why old people tend to linger in the past, weighed down by aggregating memory.
Meditation is also like this. The purpose of ritual, in this capacity, is to eliminate as many variables as possible, to focus on mind, on the nature of inner existence within a given moment. Naturally, when given free reign from additional input, present mixes more freely with past (or future). How many times have I sat in different places? How many times have I enjoyed a cup of tea in the same spot? Experience and ritual links us through time and space.
I would suggest that much of modern alienation comes from not being able to see how things relate to each other. “Home,” is itself a ground-state, a point of mental reference. When your world is disrupted, when your mind is too scattered, it stops making sense. You don’t see how you fit into anything. You start to wonder why you are in a room, any room.
When you are connected, or in flow, every place is the right place. It’s quite magical. I have observed, many times, the same streets, at the same times, change before my eyes, based on my perception. In Kokikai Aikido we have the principle, “positive mind.” It is the most important one, and also the hardest. After five years of training, I have some sense that real internal power/sense of well being is not possible without it. Gassho!